This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In the wake of a freeway standoff between troopers and a man in a motorhome, state investigators are taking over the case.
On Saturday afternoon, the motorhome broke down on southbound Interstate 215, near 1300 South in Salt Lake City, stranding three males on the side of the freeway. After the owner of the motorhome left to call for a tow, a tow-truck driver and his assistant arrived to find the other two males still with the vehicle.
But the tow-truck employees started feeling "a little bit weird about the situation," and that the two males were "acting nervous and kind of erratic," said Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Jalaine Hawkes.
"At some point, one of the [tow-truck] drivers takes a step into the motorhome from the side door and he sees three — what he reports to be — young females that are sitting in the RV," Hawkes said. "And he's not able to describe them very well, it was a very quick glance, but his impression was that the young females were scared."
Unable to tow the RV, the employees leave and call UHP about the motorhome.
When a trooper arrived, he only found one of the males, a 40-year-old Salt Lake City man, still there. The trooper tried to speak with him, but the man allegedly brandished a knife, shut the door of the motorhome and refused to come out, according to UHP.
Troopers shut down part of I-215 and brought in both a Special Emergency Response Team and a negotiator to resolve the standoff.
"A short time later, [the man] left the motor home voluntarily and was taken into custody," UHP reported in a news release. The man allegedly has a suspended driver's license and the motorhome was not registered.
Based on the report of other people possibly being in the motorhome, troopers pursued a search warrant to check inside. They did not find anyone, but did find "some drug paraphernalia," Hawkes said.
"[The man] was also interviewed later. We mainly wanted to make sure that if there were some females in the RV, we wanted to try to identify them and speak with them to just make sure everything was OK with them," Hawkes said. However, the man was not able to provide enough information to identify anyone, she added.
The man was booked into Salt Lake County jail on suspicion of multiple offenses, according to UHP.
The State Bureau of Investigation is taking over the case. Investigators are looking into surveillance footage from nearby businesses and, potentially, information from cab companies that might have picked up the other people, Hawkes said.
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