Community Police & Fire

Gig Harbor Police Blotter | Hot dog! Pet owner cited for leaving pups in parking lot

Editor’s note: The Blotter is written based on information provided by Gig Harbor Police , Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office.

Gig Harbor police cited a 50-year-old Gig Harbor woman on suspicion of animal cruelty after she left three dogs inside a car in the Target parking lot on the afternoon of Aug. 23.

Other shoppers flagged down the officer and asked him to check on the dogs. He found three pups panting heavily inside a Volkswagon. The drivers’ side window was cracked about an inch.

The officer reported the temperature at the time as 88 degrees. He could feel “excessive heat” from inside the vehicle, he wrote.

The vehicle owner returned after about 15 minutes. The officer cited her for violation of state law on “confining (a) domestic animal in (an) unsafe manner.”

Suspicious subject wasn’t

Employees of a business on Burnham Drive called police on Aug. 22 to report a man acting strangely, poking around in the landscaping outside their building.

He appeared to have left something in the bushes, they said. They retrieved it and contacted police. 

An officer took custody of the green ceramic object and asked the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office’s hazardous device squad to check it out. Two deputies took x-ray photos of the device.

It turned out to be a geocaching object with a small slip of paper inside. Geocaching is an activity in which people use their mobile phones and online hints to track down objects, often with a hidden message, placed by other participants.

The deputies evidently weren’t geocachers. They said they would dispose of the object.

Master key mailbox theft

A business manager called police on the afternoon of Aug. 21 after watching a man — who was not his mail carrier — open a bank of mailboxes at a commercial complex on Borgen Boulevard.

The suspect used a key hanging from a lanyard to access the mailboxes, just as a postal service worker would. He locked the mailboxes after he left.

An officer obtained video footage from a nearby business and identified a license plate from a vehicle the suspect used. He referred information to the prosecutor’s office.

It’s unclear if the suspect is the same arrested recently for a series of similar mail thefts using a postal service master key.

At least two other people reported mail thefts, possibly using a master key, on Sept. 8 in a neighborhood off Point Fosdick Drive.

Police chase man suspected in $35,000 worth of retail theft

Police chased, but could not apprehend, a suspect in a series of thefts from Fred Meyer stores in the region on Sept. 5.

Locally, the male suspect and a female accomplice reportedly took more than $800 worth of nicotine products from a Fred Meyer store, according to a Gig Harbor Police report. Store security told police that the same suspect is implicated in 22 thefts around the region in which more than $35,500 worth of merchandise was stolen. 

Officers pursued the suspect onto Highway 16, but abandoned the chase when he crossed the Narrows Bridge. The suspect is the subject of at least seven arrest warrants for theft.