SEQUIM — A field full of young strawberry plants took a beating early Wednesday morning — not from frost nor wild animals, but from a vandal in a pickup truck, police say.
An investigation of possible malicious mischief is under way, Clallam County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Yarnes said Thursday morning.
At about 1:15 a.m. Wednesday, “a revved-up pickup was screaming around the field,” at Woodcock and Wheeler roads, said Dave Cameron, whose family has grown berries there for nearly 40 years.
Neighbors heard the pickup, he added, and one tried to get its license plate number. It was too dark to see.
After sunrise, Cameron surveyed the damage: plants uprooted and torn apart, deep tire tracks cutting across the rows.
$1,000 in damage
He estimates at least $1,000 in damage to his crop but added it’s a bit early to tell how much of the field he can or cannot salvage.
This was, for lack of a better word, a “joyride,” he believes.
His strawberry field was the site of a similar incident 10 years ago, Cameron said, so he dug a ditch along its flanks to deter drivers.
Wednesday’s joyrider drove across the ditch, apparently on very large tires, he said.
“This happens all over the valley. There’s not a farmer out here who hasn’t had this type of damage done to them,” added Cameron, who grows strawberries, vegetable seeds and hay on about 40 acres northwest of town.
His strawberry field, a popular you-pick site every June and July, wasn’t the only place where someone in a pickup crashed through a crop.
Another field damaged
An 8-acre hayfield Cameron leases near the Sequim Prairie Grange Hall was also damaged earlier this week, and he believes it was the same offender who drove into his strawberries.
Cameron is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or people who drove into the fields.
Those with information can phone North Olympic Crimestoppers at 800-222-TIPS (8477).
Yarnes, investigating the incident Wednesday morning, spoke with neighbors who told him the offender’s vehicle was a 1970s or ’80s single-cab pickup truck, though they could not make out its color.
If Cameron’s claim of $1,000 in damage is substantiated, the driver faces felony malicious mischief charges, Yarnes said.
He added the serious crop damage may be the result of four-wheelers just out to raise a ruckus.
“I don’t know if the people responsible realize what they actually did,” Yarnes said.
Teenagers also go on mailbox-mashing sprees from time to time, he said, and so-called “doughnuts” in parking lots aren’t all that uncommon.
When asked to describe how he felt when he surveyed his field soon after dawn on Wednesday, Cameron laughed and said, “You don’t want to know.”
Even if all of the strawberry plants weren’t destroyed by the truck’s tires, the survivors are weakened and more susceptible to disease, he said.
‘Enough problems’
“Farmers have got enough problems” with weather and unpredictable market conditions, added Cameron, whose late father, David, started growing berries here in the mid-1970s.
The kind of damage done this week, he said, makes his livelihood that much more difficult.
Cameron’s Berry Farm is a small-scale family concern, with Cameron, his wife, Sid, and his brother, Pete, constituting the crew.
And though his fellow growers across the Dungeness Valley have had their crops damaged by wayward drivers, “so much of the time nothing is done or said about it.”
But Cameron wants the vandals prosecuted.
“This field elevates it to a different level,” he said, “because of the financial consequences.”
If his field falls victim to another nighttime four-wheeler, it could be permanently destroyed, Cameron added. He estimates the loss in that case at $150,000.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
