EAGLE MOUNTAIN, Utah – The Utah County Sheriff’s Office has a rather strange case of illegal dumping on its hands, saying that the garbage of several Eagle Mountain residents is going to land on private property instead of at the landfill.
Only, the people who own things are not the ones who leave them behind.
On Friday afternoon, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office sergeant. Spencer Cannon took pictures of discarded furniture, boxes and random objects that were in the snow and mud among the junipers.
The piles of trash were abandoned on a private property at the base of Lake Mountain, just outside Eagle Mountain.
Sgt. Cannon pointed to an old pair of Sorel boots, as well as a doghouse and what looked like canned beets in preserved jars. Old sofas and chairs were stacked under mattresses and dressers.
“For another 20 minutes, this guy could have done it right,” he said, referring to the fact that the dump at Cedar Fort was only five miles away by car.
When documenting the investigation, he found a box with a name.
“This contains identifiable information,” he said.
The sheriff’s office already knew who the material belonged to, because of Amazon boxes with names and addresses.
The culprits could face more than $ 1,000 in fines, the sergeant. Cannon indicated.
But that’s why the owners of all of that couldn’t believe it was left there.
“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?'” Torri Kenison asked in disbelief.
She claimed ownership of a sink, two dressers, a dog box, Christmas lights and boxes that were strewn with the rest of the trash.
“These things are mine and need to be disposed of properly. And I was angry because they lied to me,” said Scarlet Davis.
Many of the items belong to Davis and her husband, who recently emptied his garage and got rid of a trailer full of unwanted things.
The doorbell video shows how it all started when Kenison hired a Facebook man a week ago on Wednesday.
That man, she explained, posted to a community group offering to make dumps for people to earn extra money. Kenison said at least 15 people commented on accepting his offer less than 30 minutes after he posted.
“I was like, ‘Yes, I’m going to ask this guy to do this. He looks reasonable. There’s a little bit of interest,'” said Kenison.
She described how the man quickly appeared and took the items off his porch to load into his trailer. The man told her that he was picking up items for other people, she said, including a person who was paying him $ 150. Kenison and her husband paid the man $ 30, and he left.
But move on to the beginning of this week, when another Facebook post appeared in the same community group. The post warned against hiring the same man Kenison hired to do an eviction, with explanations that he was not actually going to be evicted.
Several photos were attached and Kenison immediately recognized all of his things.
“He literally threw it away two minutes from my house,” she said.
Around the corner from his house, it looked like Kenison’s trash had been abandoned along with other people’s trash. When she called the Utah county sheriff’s office, she found out they were already on the case.
“He was like, ‘So you got hit by the trash thug?'”, She said about what the cop told her. “And I said, ‘Yes’. And he said that I was one of four people who called that day to talk about it. “
Sgt. Cannon said that several people contacted them with the same story: they paid a man to transport the garbage, only to find that his things were dumped illegally on private property.
Davis discovered everything and made the original post on Facebook. She explained that someone walking around the area found the trash and noticed Davis’s name on some of the boxes, then held out her hand.
Your post generated comments from many other people, recognizing your items.
“My stuff was unloaded with a lot of other people’s stuff,” she said. “Then they came and said, ‘Oh, this is mine. This is mine.'”
Davis said she and her husband paid the man $ 100 and even let him borrow the trailer, which was full, to go to the so-called dump.
While Davis was worried at first that the sheriff’s office would find her items and fine her, now she just wants it all cleaned up. She said that many people offered to help her transport everything this weekend and dispose of it properly.
In the meantime, Kenison and Davis sent messages to the man to confront him. Each of them said he denies having thrown the items there, and went so far as to tell Kenison that the items she found were not hers.
The person behind this strange venture has a family, Davis said. She said she understands difficult times and bad decisions and does not expect her money back.
But she wants him to make better choices and learn from it.
“If they get away with things like this, it ends up harming the community and themselves,” she said. “So, I just want him to acknowledge that what he did was wrong.”
The Sheriff’s Office is now working to hold that person accountable. Sgt. Cannon said he could face misdemeanor charges and potentially fines to cover cleaning costs.
“These people expected to be receiving legitimate service,” he said. “And that’s what they got, a pile of rubbish – owned by them – thrown here.”