Utah Booby Traps Found by Military Veteran
A popular hiking trail in Utah was the target of a booby trap, but was discovered before anyone tripped the wire.
The forest service in Utah received a call about suspicious activity along the trail and dispatched a forest officer to investigate.
James Schoeffler, 33, a law enforcement officer with the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, found the traps along a canyon trail in Provo, about 45 miles south of Salt Lake City.
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A former military officer and current U.S Forest Service Officer, Schoeffler was trained in detecting things that seem out of place and disposing of them.
Schoeffler served four tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan as a bomb technician and his experience proved invaluable to fellow hikers.
One of the traps that he came across was a 20-pound wooden spiked boulder that was connected to fishing line and designed to swing at head level.
"It was just so out of place and so odd," Schoeffler told The Associated Press. "I've seen devices and booby traps all over the world, but I never thought I'd see one in Provo, Utah."
But he knew that something was not right and that he had a feeling that there probably was more than one device.
"Typically, anywhere I've been, if there's one, there's two, if there's three, there's four," Schoeffler said.
"The way I treated that is the way I would treat a scene in a deployed environment ... As a bomb disposal technician, you would find and disarm them."
After a short moment he uncovered the second device by following another fishing line close to the ground to a set of sharpened wooden spikes set in the ground at a 45 degree angle.
"Impalement was a very real possibility," he said, noting the spikes could have easily stuck in a throat, stomach or eye if someone had tripped on the fishing line.
The discovery led to the arrest of Benjamin Steven Rutkowski, 19, and Kai Matthew Christensen, 21, who were both charged with reckless endangerment.
