Quartet of Squatters, Vandals, Rounded Up by Pasco Police
Pasco Police are reporting the arrest of four men after they allegedly broke into a vacant office building and set up camps.
Around 8:45 AM Monday, police responded to a vacant office building in the 900 block of West Lewis. The caller told them he'd been watching over the building for a friend who was out of town, and the structure had been boarded up for safekeeping.
Police found someone entered by prying off a board over a basement window, shattered it, and entered. Inside police found general mayhem, the building had been vandalized and ransacked, and a homeless camp set up.
The building owner's truck, which was parked alongside, had been broken into, badly vandalized and sprayed with graffiti. The caller noticed a man walking away from the truck when he'd arrived that morning.
The truck prowler, identified as 36-year-old Jeremy Arthur Smith of Pasco, was apprehended near Fiesta Foods. Other officers began calling people out of the building, and three more suspects nabbed, James Jeffrey Dixon, 56, of Pasco; Anthony James Maricich, 34, homeless, and Scott Joseph Morrison, 32, of West Richland.
The quartet of burglars plus the car prowler, makes five related arrests. The burglars are all facing a wide variety of charges.