A trucker’s quick thinking left a suspected meat thief frozen in his tracks at a rest stop in Indiana this morning.
Minnesota based trucker Joel Schumacher was stopped last night at a rest area in Indiana off of eastbound I-74 with a trailer full of frozen meat. Around 4 a.m. this morning, Schumacher caught a man in his trailer attempting to steal the meat. Thinking fast, Schumacher locked the suspect in the trailer — which was -10 degrees — and called the Ripley County Sheriff’s Office.
When police arrived on the scene, they said that they could hear the suspect pounding on the walls of the trailer to be let out.
The suspect was identified as 51 year old Malcolm Denton of Shelbyville.
Denton was taken into police custody and charged with Unauthorized Entry of a Vehicle and Theft.
This isn’t the first time that a truck driver has outwitted a thief by trapping him in a truck’s trailer (there was an incident in early March in which a delivery truck driver used this trick to detain a liquor thief until police could arrive, for example), but it IS the first time that we can recall that a suspect was trapped in a refrigerated truck.