One year after theft, eight ‘suspects’ have been fired and barred from the post — but never charged with a crime

It began the day Jim Atkins called in sick.

Atkins, a contract maintenance worker at Dugway Proving Ground, had pneumonia. All he wanted to do was stay home and rest. But on the night of March 28, 2007, he was dragged from his home in pajamas, slippers and handcuffs by Dugway's civilian police force. Atkins sat for three hours in a police captain's office, listening to the voices of his co-workers as they were questioned. Down the hallway, two more of his co-workers sat, cuffed, in a small jail cell.

The night's drama was about one thing: copper wire. A giant spool of it had gone missing from a supply yard on the military post over President's Day weekend 2007. The 2,000 feet of wire had an estimated street value of $37,717, according to Paula Nicholson, public affairs officer for Dugway Proving Ground.

Atkins and his co-workers were suspects.

Fast forward to a year later. Atkins, 46, a native of St. Louis, has been living in a friend's basement apartment in Tooele and working as a handyman for the past year. He was fired from his job at Dugway and barred from ever again setting foot on the post where he had lived and worked for 19 years. Yet he has never been charged with any crime.

"Most of my adult life I have worked for the Army or been in the Army, and this was just a slap in the face," Atkins said. "I know I didn't do anything wrong, and the people who know me know I didn't do anything wrong. But I lost my home, I lost my profession, I lost everything."

Atkins story is echoed by a half-dozen of his co-workers -- all men who lost their jobs at Dugway in the wake of the copper wire theft and now carry a black mark on their resumes. None of them has ever been charged with a crime.

Missing copper wire

To understand what happened to Atkins and his co-workers, it helps to understand Dugway itself. The post is more than a work place for the 1,000 folks who live there. It is a small, tightly knit community surrounded by secrets -- from field testing chemical agents during the Cold War to warehousing vaccines to every chemical weapon known to man. On post, everyone knows everyone else. It's commonplace to work in the same building as your spouse or ex-spouse.

Dugway sits on 798,214 acres, and is remote in the extreme. It's surrounded by a chain link fence and has only two access points. The entrance to this modern-day fortress is a maze of concrete lane dividers. The first line of defense is several armed guards in a kiosk. These guards aren't regular Army, they're contract employees, and they decide who gets in. The exit is not monitored by guards. Guests leave passes in a drop box and vehicles are very rarely checked on the way out. The other access to Dugway is through a locked gate in the middle of the west desert near Simpson Springs -- a gate so remote most folks don't know it's there.

On the day of his arrest, Atkins had asked his friend and colleague Ray Dewsnup, 55, a tech specialist, to cover his shift at the Life Sciences Building in the West Desert Test Center. Atkins and Dewsnup were employees of Griffin Services, a company that holds a lucrative government contract to provide maintenance services for about 20 buildings in an area folks in the know refer to as "ditto." This building complex includes offices and laboratory spaces. The Life Sciences Building itself is a sensitive, vacuum-sealed, climate-controlled building.

On March 28, 2007, with Atkins at home sick and Dewsnup covering his shift, a couple of gentlemen in suits were looking through a storage room across from Life Sciences Building. The room was used to stored everything from plumbing parts to varied lengths of copper wire.

Atkins and Dewsnup said investigators must have had their eyes on strands of conductor copper wire stored in the room, believing it to be part of the 2,000-foot spool that had been stolen. The spool itself was too heavy to be lifted without heavy equipment and too large to fit in the bed of an ordinary pick up truck.

"Most of the wire in the storeroom was inventory," Atkins said. "It wasn't something we were hoarding and hiding, it was on an inventory sheet somewhere."

Atkins said the stolen spool was stored in a remote storage room in the middle of the desert, no where close to the small conglomeration of buildings he and his co-workers frequented.

Nonetheless, Dewsnup was questioned briefly by Special Agent Christopher Hennigan, an Army investigator, and then hauled down to the civilian police station for more questioning, but not after more than a dozen other men with access to the same storeroom were also brought in.

Electricians Layne Martin and Allen Yerke found out they were wanted by security when they were out in the field taking care of services orders.

Martin recalled being questioned the week before, along with 118 other Griffin Services employees, and said he thought nothing of submitting to the special agent's questions again.

Martin, who had been Griffin Services employee of the month February 2007, had only worked for the company for three years. He spent most of his time working in tandem with Yerke. Along with Yerke and Dewsnup, Martin was cuffed and held at the police department for several hours.

At about the same time, Atkins, who had lived in a house in English Village, was arrested.

Many of those arrested say they received letters barring them from returning to the post on the day of their arrest.

"Before we were called in and questioned they had these bar letters already typed up," Atkins said.

The letter read: "You are hereby notified that upon receipt of this letter, you are ordered not to reenter or to be found within the limits of the United States Military Reservation, Dugway Proving Ground."

The letter went on to state that each man had been "significantly and substantially involved in misconduct involving knowingly stealing, converting or using government property."

In short, these men could never return to their jobs again.

Case still not closed

The decision to bar the men -- all civilian contractor employees -- from Dugway was handed down from Dugway's then commander Army Col. Greg Olson.

"An investigation revealed 'significant and substantial' misconduct in the theft of government property," said spokesperson Nicholson in an e-mail to the Transcript-Bulletin. "The contractor [Griffin Services], and not Dugway Proving Grounds, determined whether or not to terminate these employees or relocate them to other contractor work sites."

Dewsnup said his co-workers, none of whom were willing to relocate, were useless to Griffin after they had been barred from working on the post.

A total of eight contract workers were barred from post and consequently fired by their contractor employer, Nicholson said. Six of the eight worked closely together and the other two worked in an area over 20 minutes away.

Nicholson said the case is still open and was turned over to the United States Attorney's Office in Salt Lake City for prosecution of theft of government property. Although the investigation by the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army has been completed, Atkins said he's never heard a word regarding the conclusions made.

"They've been giving us the run-around for a year now," Atkins said.

Nicholson said none of the men have been charged, but all have been "titled," which will prevent or make it difficult for them to ever work for the federal government again. Nicholson also said Dugway currently has no plans to contemplate lifting the bar on the men working at Dugway again.

"If future legal actions determine differently, the letters could be repealed," Nicholson said.

As for the copper wire, some was sold and some was eventually found on Dugway and secured, Nicholson said.

Many of the men fired say the Army acted in haste, yet refuses to re-examine its actions.

"They found a way to justify their actions -- and we paid the price," Dewsnup said.

Jamie Belnap: jamieb@tooeletranscript.com