CEDAR CITY — A 53-year-old Enoch man has been cited on suspicion of abandoning a boat near a public highway north of Cedar City on Memorial Day.
According to charges filed Wednesday in Iron County Justice Court, Joseph Edward Ellis was cited for the infractions of littering, abandoning a vessel on a highway and operating a vehicle without a valid registration — as well as driving on a suspended or revoked license, a class C misdemeanor.
A passerby who not only witnessed the incident but also subsequently spotted the suspect vehicle parked at a store in Enoch spoke with Cedar City News Tuesday night.
Spencer Jordan said he noticed a pickup truck parked off to the side of state Route 130, also known as the Minersville Highway, near mile marker 13 north of Enoch on Monday afternoon.
“I just figured, well, you know, it’s not illegal to sit on the side of the road. Maybe he just had some vehicle issues,” Jordan said. “So I just drive by, but I just kind of take a mental note of what I’d seen. When I come back an hour later, I notice the truck’s gone, but the boat’s there. And I realize, boom, in my head, he was sitting there waiting for a good time to dump it.”
Jordan said that soon after he called to report the incident, an Iron County Sheriff’s deputy responded to the scene and began to take pictures of the boat, which did not appear to be operable and was filled with trash.
They found an empty pizza box that had a sticker on it with a name of the person who had ordered the pizza. That potential clue turned out to be a dead-end, Jordan said, adding that he spent about 20 minutes at the scene with the deputy before driving away to resume his ranching work.
Not long afterward, Jordan said he noticed the same truck he had seen earlier, driving along the same road.
“Lo and behold, there’s the guy who dumped the boat, come speeding by and pass us like a bat out of hell,” Jordan recalled, noting that the deputy was still looking at the boat and taking photographs of it when the truck drove by.
“He went slow past the boat and then he just sped up to easily like 90 miles an hour. He’s gone.”
Jordan said even though he was some distance behind the truck, he followed it toward Enoch, hoping to spot it again. He then happened to notice it parked in front of Family Dollar, just off the roundabout at SR-130’s intersection with Midvalley Road. Jordan said he remained at the scene as officers from Iron County Sheriff’s Office, Utah Highway Patrol and Enoch City Police responded and began questioning the driver.
Jordan said he overheard the man tell officers that he had gotten stuck while turning around and the boat had accidentally fallen off the trailer.
“That’s what I heard with my own two ears and I just started laughing,” Jordan recalled.
Jordan said that based on the evidence he had seen, he believes it was dumped intentionally.
“This was strategic,” he said, noting that the boat had been found downhill from where tire marks showed the truck had peeled out suddenly.
“It didn’t magically fall off,” he said. “There was burnouts where he was probably jumping his truck and putting it in drive to get the boat to shake off, but it wasn’t an accident.”
Ladd Brindley, owner of towing company Ladd’s Transport that went out and retrieved the boat on Monday, also spoke with Cedar City News and said the incident underscores a problem he sees all too often.
“If it’s a legitimate job, like an accident or an abandoned car, that’s what we do. That’s our job,” Brindley said. “But to clean up garbage around the county that people just dump, that’s not our job. Why do they push that off on the tow truck companies?”
Brindley mentioned another recent incident involving a suspected illegal trash dump.
“I saw a guy go out there and he had a bunch of stuff in the back of his truck, carpet and appliances and stuff,” Brindley recalled. “I was going down the road and I saw him pulling in and I thought, ‘I bet that guy’s gonna dump that.’ And then, a half-hour or so later, I come up the freeway and he’s pulling out of there with his truck empty.”
In another instance, Brindley said he and his workers were called to go pick up and haul away a trailer that had long since been abandoned in a remote area near Beryl Junction.
“Out in the middle of nowhere, because somebody complained about a camp trailer that’s been parked out there for years,” he said. “And there’s no tires, no wheels, no nothing. They have us come out there and spend half a day getting it towed.”
“There’s places where there’s so much garbage dumped around, it makes you sick,” he added. “The thing is, if the county needed help doing that, I’d take my equipment and my dump trailers and go clean it up. But I don’t want to bring it back. I don’t want to have to pay a guy to go do it, bring it back here, let it sit in my yard and take up space that I don’t have and then have to tow it again.”
Brindley said the paperwork involved in disposing of a junk vehicle can also be a hassle, which he suspects may have been the case in Monday’s incident.
“If he was just hauling it off and going to pay to dump it, they probably wouldn’t let him because he didn’t have a title,” Brindley said. “So he couldn’t get rid of it. So all he’s got to do is dump it out in the brush and then go.”
Meanwhile, for his part, Jordan said he’d like to see the county landfill again waive its dumping fees like it did last summer in the wake of the widespread damage caused by monsoon flooding.
“Either way, our tax money is cleaning it up, whether it’s out here illegally dumped,” Jordan said. “We’re either spending to clean it up or we just let them just take it to the dump for free.”
“I’m big on keeping stuff in the trash can or at the dump where it belongs,” Jordan said, adding that he would even go so far as to help pay someone’s landfill fees, if necessary.
“If it’s about the money, let me know how much the bill is going to be and I’ll Venmo you the money so you don’t have to leave it out in the desert,” he said.
“I want to keep Iron County, Washington County and surrounding counties clean,” Jordan added. “I don’t want to be driving through the state and see a dump on both sides of the road.”
Iron County Commissioner Marilyn Wood said on Thursday that she spoke with county public works director Bruce Anderson, who oversees the landfill.
“Bruce said that boat might be 20 bucks to take in,” she said. “So, do you make the rest of the county pay for somebody else having a junk boat? If they have a junk boat, they should take it to the landfill themselves and pay the $20.”
Wood said that Anderson also told her, “I’ve been in this business for a long time, and there’s just certain people that are going to go dump out in the desert, whether it’s free or not. They’ll just dump in the desert anyway. We clean them up all the time.”
Wood said Anderson told her that in many cases, the culprits are caught in the act.
“If they catch them, then they can press charges against them for dumping,” Wood said, adding that the person responsible could also be sued for the towing bill.
Wood says she wouldn’t have a problem with the county waiving its landfill fees again should an emergency situation arise, like last year’s flooding.
“We would do that again in a heartbeat,” she said. “Because I just feel like that it’s really important as a community, that we take care of the problem. But just opening it up for anyone to go out there … some of us don’t have a bunch of garbage to take, but others do. So why should one person pay for another person’s junk?”
Persons arrested or charged are presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law or as otherwise decided by a trier-of-fact.
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