SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. - Early Friday morning a Spokane Valley Police Officer was responding to a fight call when he hit a log laying in the middle of the road. Now the Spokane County Sheriff's Department is investigating not only whether that log was deliberately placed in the road, but if the fight call may have been the bait.
The deputy who was driving has a cracked vertebrae and will be off the job for at least a week or two, but it's amazing he wasn't killed. What is suspicious about the log laying in the road is that if the officer didn't hit that, there was also a bin full of rocks ahead of the log.
The fact it could have been intentionally set, has a lot of people, including the Sheriff upset.
"It just shows that it's getting more and more dangerous out there on the streets for the deputies. and they're already running very short-staffed, so when they respond, they don't have a lot of back up," Sheriff Knezovich told KHQ on Saturday.
The officer was originally responding to a call of a fight between some 20 people at Pines Elementary and getting there on Pines would have been the fastest route. But that's where a 2-foot log, a large branch, and a blue plastic bin full of heavy rocks were sitting; in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night.
The debris itself wasn't the only the red flag. Another is the call of the fight itself may have been bogus. Officers responding found nobody there, and nobody running away. If the reported 20 people were involved, the Sheriff's Office says they would have seen something.
Sheriff Knezovich says, with damage like this, the officer is lucky he wasn't killed.
"If we do determine that it is, basically, an ambush situation for the Deputies, we will be looking at full prosecution."
The Sheriff told KHQ that because the Spokane Valley Police Department contracts with the Sheriff's Office, they are deputized officers, which means if this theory turns out to be true, with two deputies shot earlier this year, this would be the third deputy someone has tried to kill in the last two months.
If you have any information on this incident, please call Crime Check immediately at 456-2233.
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