Thursday, November 1, 2007

Familiar face

In our daily roll-call assemblies at the beginning of each shift, Capt. Jim Thoms likes to highlight some particularly noteworthy person he would like to see arrested. These are normally prolific alleged criminals who Jim wants less senior officers to become familiar with now, knowing that this will serve them well as their careers unfold. With surprising regularity, his favorite subject gets picked up in a short period of time. Putting the focus on an individual fugitive in this way may be part of the reason for the successful apprehensions.

This summer, one elusive defendant started dominating Capt. Thoms most wanted position for an embarrassingly long time. Derek Breazeale has a pretty extensive criminal history, and had previously served time in prison for burglary. He was the subject of two felony arrest warrants this summer, resulting from several burglaries early this year he is alleged to have committed shortly after the expiration of his parole. Frankly, his photo had been displayed on the big monitors in our briefing room for so long I was afraid it was starting to burn in the plasma screen.

On October 10, we were all relieved hear he was finally arrested in rather dramatic fashion near Junction City, Kansas as were law enforcement officers in Kansas, Illinois, and Iowa. At last, someone else could become Capt. Thom's most wanted.

Until today, that is.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just shook my head when I read that he'd escaped custody earlier today. He's really becoming an expensive guy, from a resources-expended standpoint.

Anonymous said...

That one sort of confused me when it happened. Forgive my memory here if I'm wrong (or the Journal-Star was wrong), but it appeared that this man's major infractions happened months or a year earlier. The LSJ made it sound like he'd been in/out of custody a couple times since then, but all the sudden, he as a huge threat/possibly dangerous? And then, he was serindiptiously, yet temporarily caught in Kansas. What changed to all the sudden make him such a person of interest and show up in the paper? When I read the original article that he was wanted, I assumed it was something recent, but like I said, it was all stuff that had happened much earlier? (I apologize... 5 am is not my clearest hour of the day... unable... to... make... sentences/thoughts... clearly). :)

Tom Casady said...

If you read some of those news links in the post, you'll see that this defendant is suspected in quite a little multi-state crime spree, including some gunfire. We received some additional intelligence information that heightened our concern, as well. The two arrest warrants we had here in Lincoln were for buglaries in the early part of 2007, but the additional criminal activity he is suspected of was quite current.