A man arrested Monday near Black Lake, outside Tumwater in Thurston County, Washington, was sitting handcuffed in the back of a sheriff’s patrol car when, according to Sheriff Derek Sanders, he moved the cuffs to the front of his body, pried off the inside door panel and used the metal cuffs to short out the car’s disabled rear window switch. The window rolled down, and he fled on foot, still in handcuffs.
Sanders laid that out Monday evening in a post on his official Facebook page, along with about six minutes of body camera video from the search after the patrol car escape. Deputies had been called to the Black Lake area for what he described as a domestic violence order violation and burglary in progress. The man first refused to come outside, the sheriff wrote, then surrendered and was placed in the car while deputies waited on scene for the victim. That car “was an older vehicle in the fleet and was not equipped with window bars,” Sanders wrote.
Video: Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders, via Facebook
A warning shot, a tired K9 and a pair of pliers
Over a manhunt that lasted several hours, Sanders wrote, the man broke into a second house and took tools and clothes. When the sheriff arrived to help, deputies were still trying to bring in more resources. No air support was available, and the office’s dog, K9 Mac, was tiring and needed to be swapped out.
A few minutes after Sanders got there, a single gunshot went off nearby. He wrote that he found a homeowner who said they had fired a warning shot to get deputies’ attention, then pointed them toward where the man had gone. After a short track, Mac found him under a porch. “The suspect had a pair of pliers stuck to the handcuffs when he was re-captured,” Sanders wrote.
The body camera’s clock reads 6:02 p.m. as the video opens inside a patrol car on a gravel road, and by 6:08 p.m. it shows deputies holding a man face down in a yard with the dog a few feet away. The Olympian, citing jail logs, reported that the man is 44 and that the arrest was logged at about 6:08 p.m. on Kinney Road near Black Lake.
Sanders wrote that the man was booked into the county jail for violation of a protection order (domestic violence), residential burglary (domestic violence), malicious mischief for damaging the patrol car, and second-degree escape. Those are booking allegations. The post does not say whether the Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has filed charges.
A few hundred dollars of steel on the state contract
Disabling a rear window switch stops it from working when a prisoner presses it. It does not remove the switch, the wiring or the window motor from the door. Sanders’ account is that the man got behind the trim and shorted the switch with the only metal he had. “Never in my career have I ever heard of a suspect hot wiring a disabled window switch with their metal handcuffs,” he wrote.
The hardware that closes that route costs little next to the car. Washington agencies can order patrol vehicles and their upfit equipment through the state Department of Enterprise Services, and I read the purchase requests the department posts. A request the department itself submitted on July 6, 2023, for a 2023 Ford Police Interceptor Utility lists Setina “2nd Row Window Barriers, Steel Bars” at $562. The city of Spokane’s request for a 2025 Police Interceptor Utility, submitted in September 2024, prices the same line at $304 and adds “TPO Door Panels, Rear Doors” for $297. Setina says its TPO door guards fit over a vehicle’s existing rear doors and hardware. Spokane’s request totaled $75,772.68, so the bars and door covers together came to less than 1% of it.
Sanders called the escape “a great example as to why the decision was made in 2023 to invest money into our patrol car fleet,” and wrote, “All of our patrol vehicles come with window bars now.” Set beside his description of Monday’s car, that means new cars arrive with bars, while at least one older car without them was still being used to hold an arrestee. The post doesn’t say how many older cars remain in that role.
2023 is also the year Thurston County commissioners sent voters a public safety sales tax of two-tenths of 1%, with up to 75% of the money going to law enforcement, according to the county’s Proposition 1 page. The JOLT News Organization reported that in August 2024, after voters approved the tax, commissioners authorized 18 vehicles and 18 radios for deputies hired under it. Sanders’ post doesn’t say whether the window bars were paid for with that money. Patrol car design has left openings elsewhere, too: in Florida, someone drove a marked Broward Sheriff’s Charger out of the agency’s own headquarters.
Washington’s escape law turns on the word “charged”
The escape count may be the hardest of the four to make stick. Under RCW 9A.76.120, a person commits second-degree escape, a class C felony, by knowingly escaping from a detention facility, or by knowingly escaping from custody after “having been charged with a felony.” A class C felony carries up to five years and a $10,000 fine under RCW 9A.20.021. Escaping from custody without either of those elements is third-degree escape under RCW 9A.76.130: a misdemeanor on a first offense, punishable by up to 90 days and a $1,000 fine, rising to a gross misdemeanor with one prior conviction and a class C felony with two or more.
Washington’s Court of Appeals has applied that wording to a case with close to the same facts. A Spokane County deputy arrested Gary Ault on March 2, 2018, for residential burglary and violating a no-contact order. On the ride to jail, Ault slipped one hand out of his cuffs, and when the deputy opened the door outside the jail entrance, he ran. He was convicted of second-degree escape. In an unpublished opinion filed Feb. 25, 2020, Division Three reversed that conviction. The court held that being arrested for a felony is not the same as being charged with one, and that the statute requires an information or a grand jury indictment to be filed before the escape. It sent the case back for entry of third-degree escape.
Because it is unpublished, Ault doesn’t bind Thurston County Superior Court, which sits in Division Two’s territory. Under General Rule 14.1, though, an unpublished Court of Appeals opinion filed on or after March 1, 2013, can be cited as nonbinding authority, so it is available to any defense lawyer in the state.
That leaves prosecutors the other half of the statute. RCW 9A.76.010 defines a detention facility as “any place used for the confinement of a person” who has been arrested for, charged with or convicted of an offense. Whether the back seat of a patrol car parked at the scene fits that definition is a question the Ault opinion did not take up. If the man already faced a pending felony charge in another case, that could also satisfy the statute; nothing I found in the public record says either way.
The damaged door and the protection order carry their own penalties
The other counts don’t depend on that distinction. Residential burglary is a class B felony under RCW 9A.52.025. The malicious mischief count can reach felony level without a big repair bill. RCW 9A.48.080 makes it second-degree malicious mischief, a class C felony, to cause more than $750 in damage, or to physically damage or tamper with an emergency vehicle in a way that creates a substantial risk of interrupting service to the public. Prosecutors would not need a body shop estimate over $750 if they can show the pried-off door panel risked keeping a patrol car off the road.
The protection order is why deputies arrived ready to make an arrest. RCW 7.105.450 requires officers to arrest, without a warrant, a person they have probable cause to believe violated certain provisions of a protection order the person knew about. Most of those violations are gross misdemeanors. One becomes a class C felony if it involves an assault, if it is reckless conduct that creates a substantial risk of death or serious injury, or if the person has at least two prior convictions for violating such orders. Sanders’ post doesn’t say which category this case falls into.
What comes next in Thurston County
Formal charges are up to the Thurston County prosecutor’s office, and the escape count will show whether it follows the Division Three reasoning or argues that a patrol car is a detention facility. The law cuts in an odd direction for anyone who ends up in a back seat in Washington: running from the car after an arrest can land as a first-offense misdemeanor, while damaging the car on the way out can be a felony by itself.
For the sheriff’s office, the open item is the fleet. Sanders’ own post establishes that a car without window bars was holding an arrestee as of Monday, and steel window bars were listed at $304 on Spokane’s state-contract order.
Should departments pull every patrol car without window bars and door guards from prisoner duty until it gets them, or is it reasonable to keep older cars in rotation while new ones with the hardware arrive?