Man arrested after snatching drugs, running into woods

PALMER — Snatching his drugs and syringe off of the trunk of his car and taking off into the woods wasn’t enough to keep a Big Lake man out of jail Wednesday.

It did, however, give him time enough to ditch the contraband, Alaska State Troopers allege.

According to an affidavit Trooper Joshua Varys filed in the court case against Dylan Cabot Tuel, the call to respond to Kaye Lake Drive near South Johnson Road came in at 6:51 a.m. The caller said there was a suspicious man going through the glove box of a gold vehicle with handicap plates in the middle of the road.

When Varys arrived, the man, who turned out to be Tuel, was rummaging through the trunk. Tuel told him he’d stopped to make a phone call, Varys reports. Then he said he’d stopped to look for water with which to wash his dirty hands.

“During my contact with Tuel I observed his hands were not dirty and he was sweating profusely despite wearing a T-shirt and jeans with the outside temperature around 15 degrees,” Varys wrote. “Tuel said hew as a ‘little nervous’ and admitted to being on probation for theft. Tuel’s eyes were pinpoints.”

Tuel said he was coming from his mother’s home. The car was registered to her, Varys wrote.

The trooper decided to call Tuel’s probation officer, who told him to search Tuel. That search turned up the syringe and a “Ziplock baggy that was wrapped around a black, tarry substance,” Varys wrote.

Troopers didn’t get a chance to field test either the black tarry substance or the substance inside the syringe. A needle and a black tarry substance, though, are both consistent with heroin.

“I placed both of the items onto the trunk of the vehicle. I was in the process of having Tuel move away from the vehicle to the front of my patrol vehicle (when) Tuel broke away from my grasp, grabbed the bag with the black tarry substance and needle off of the vehicle and ran into the woods,” Varys wrote.

Varys chased Tuel for about 100 yards before he lost sight of him. He and another trooper ordered Tuel to stop and come back to no avail. So, they called in Wasilla Police Officer Don Ridge and his dog Marshal. An hour of tracking found Tuel a mile away hiding in a swamp.

“Tuel was cold, wet and exhausted,” Varys wrote in an AST press release.

In his affidavit, Varys writes that the drugs and syringe were nowhere to be found.

Tuel was jailed at the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility without bail. He was charged with evidence tampering and a probation violation. As of Saturday afternoon, Tuel was still in jail.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com