Feature | Taylorsville 911!: A messy tale of cops, robbers ... and a little dog, too 

Debbie Evans was perched on the edge of a narrow concrete bench in the Salt Lake County lockup, handcuffed to a stainless-steel bar that ran along the rim of the wall behind her.

A fight over ownership of her family’s dog, an 11-year-old Boston terrier named Oscar, had led to her incarceration. Evans, a 34-year-old mother of two adolescents with no criminal record, couldn’t believe it had come to this. She still can’t.

An hour before, she had refused to reveal Oscar’s location to Taylorsville Police Det. Casey Davies and four other officers who had surrounded her car in the driveway of her home at 2 p.m. on May 25, 2006. Andrea Dirker, a Midvale police officer in the narcotics division, had filed a complaint two weeks earlier, alleging two people fitting descriptions of Debbie Evans’ husband, Jim, and his 14-year-old son Justin snatched her dog from her mother’s driveway. The Evanses claim, however, that Dirker originally stole the dog from them.

When the Taylorsville officers threatened Debbie Evans with incarceration if she didn’t turn over Oscar, she didn’t believe them. Davies wasn’t joking. He

charged her with obstruction of justice, slapped the cuffs on her in her kitchen in the Evanses’ 90-year-old home in Garden Park, near Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood, and marched her down the quiet, tree-lined street to a squad car.

The next thing she knew, she was in a pit with a bathroom and a telephone taking turns with that day’s DUI suspects to phone for help. Her husband, a commercial airline pilot, was on the other side of the country, in Raleigh, N.C. He says the police told him on the phone, “Your wife isn’t getting out of jail until we get the dog back.”

Jim Evans called his friend, Southwest Airlines pilot Chris Eyring. It was Eyring who had agreed to look after Oscar while the Evanses over several years tried to sell their Kentucky home, resolve some employment issues, and move back to Salt Lake City. “There was no one to watch the dog,” Jim Evans recalls. At the time Eyring agreed to “dogsit” Oscar, his live-in girlfriend was Andrea Dirker. When they broke up, Dirker took the dog with her.

“I can’t have Deb in jail,” Evans told Eyring. “I’m going to work out a deal with the prosecutor.” Evans arranged for Eyring to hand the dog over to Davies, along with his supervisor, Sgt. Rosie Rivera, and ex-West Valley SWAT team leader and then Taylorsville officer, Ed Spann, at the Humane Society of Utah. But first, Evans wanted the dog’s chip scanned in front of the officers to identify the registered owner.

Spann’s nickname at Taylorsville, Eyring says, was “Rambo.” Thanks to Oscar, Davies’ unfortunate sobriquet became “Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.” Throw in that the breed of dog they were hunting is prone to snoring and farting, according to Salt Lake City-based Boston terrier breeder Carol Enright, and the mayhem surrounding Oscar sounds more like an episode of Comedy Central’s cop parody hit, Reno 911, than routine policing.

“They were pretty pumped up,” Eyring says about how jumpy Davies, Spann and Rivera were at the animal shelter. “They wanted to take somebody to jail, they wanted to throw somebody onto the sidewalk.” He suspects Rambo, Rivera and Ace were hoping he would flee, clutching Oscar in his arms, and lead them on a high-speed chase across Salt Lake County. If so, they were disappointed. He handed Oscar over and Davies took the dog back to Dirker.

Debbie Evans was released six hours after she was booked into jail. No charges were filed against her. “That’s false arrest,” the Evanses’ lawyer, Jerry Conder, says. “It was done as an intimidation tactic to secure the dog for a fellow officer.” Eyring picked her up from the jail. As Debbie got into his truck, her Levi capris ripped. “I thought, ‘Perfect,’” she recalls. “I’ve just been in jail, my pants tore, I’ve had it, I’m done.” She dissolved into tears.

As with any custody dispute, there’s a murkiness to the emotional entanglements that underpin Oscar’s fate. Everyone has a point of view. But police reports and court documents point to highly questionable behavior by a detective with alleged business connections to the complainant and lack of supervision by his commanding officers. When you add the tax dollars spent on the police investigation and ongoing legal bills relating to the criminal and civil cases, the saga of Oscar the dog becomes less of a farce and more of a disturbing portrait of cronyism, profligacy and abuse of power.

The Evanses’ lawyer Jerry Conder also represents the state chapter of the Fraternal Order of Policemen [FOP]. Although Conder says he “doesn’t like suing peace officers,” the way Taylorsville Police Department behaved left him no choice. “They screwed up,” he says. “It was like swatting a fly with an atomic bomb.”

Theft charges against Jim Evans and his son Justin were eventually dropped. Nevertheless, the Evanses wanted their day in court. On August 31, 2006, Conder filed a $1.5 million federal lawsuit alleging unlawful arrest against Taylorsville City, Davies, then-police chief Larry Marx, Dirker, her mother and stepfather.

In building a case, Conder hired ex-Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office veteran Nicholas Morgan to review the events. In his report, he claims, “This is a case of abuse of police powers with questionable objectives in mind.” That objective was to get the dog back to Dirker. She and her relatives recently settled with the Evanses for an undisclosed amount, Eyring says.

If Jim and Debbie Evans thought they were safe from further prosecution, though, they were misguided. This past March, Taylorsville City prosecutor Lorenzo Miller, husband of Salt Lake County District Attorney Lohra Miller, refiled charges against Jim Evans that he had dismissed five months after the dog was returned to Dirker. At the time of the dismissal, Miller had noted he would refile the theft charge as a class A misdemeanor. “Any other case, that’s the end of it,” Conder says. Indeed, for a year and a half, nothing happened. Then Miller resurrected the charges.

Det. Davies offered no new evidence in his probable-cause statement for the new charges. The only difference was the value of the dog. In the 2006 filing, it was listed as less than $300. The new charges put Oscar’s worth between $300 and $1,000, without any explanation for his sudden rise in value. That increase allowed Miller to raise the charge from a class B misdemeanor to a class A, which doubles Jim Evans’ potential jail time to a year and a fine of $2,500.

The new charges, Conder says, are more than suspicious. They certainly brought the Evanses’ civil lawsuit slamming to a halt. U.S. District Court Judge Ted Stewart, who is presiding over the civil suit, put it on hold so the criminal case can be dealt with. For Conder, the new case amounts to vindictive prosecution. He accuses Miller of aiding Taylorsville City’s attorneys—law firm Parsons Kinghorn Harris—in their battle against the Evanses’ federal lawsuit by dragging Evans into criminal court.

If true, such allegations would be oddly appropriate, given how far Taylorsville’s investigative division went on behalf of a fellow officer. “What is it worth that the police department treats you fairly and does not favor somebody else, particularly another officer?” Conder asks. Miller’s filing of charges, as with Det. Davies’ pursuit of the dog on behalf of Dirker, emphasize how far Taylorsville City will go to help out its friends and punish its enemies, even at the expense, it seems, of the constitutional rights of those it is sworn to serve.

When contacted by City Weekly for an interview, Davies declined to comment, as did Taylorsville’s Sgt. Rivera, the department’s public information officer, citing pending litigation. After first agreeing to an interview, Dirker did not respond to further calls.

The Evanses, however, want to talk. For Jim Evans, this saga is an indictment of the judicial system. “If this kind of thing happens over a dog, if things can go this far from an investigative and prosecutorial standpoint, then it’s pretty corrupt in my opinion,” he says. “It’s a buddy-buddy system in our case, and it shouldn’t be like that.”

PUPPY LOVE
Jim and Debbie Evans bought Oscar when he was eight weeks old at a puppy farm in Apopka, Fla., in early 1996. They say they paid $100 for the puppy, which came without papers.

“It was a dirty, filthy house,” Jim Evans recalls. Oscar had a wound in his head because the dog’s sire nipped him for getting into his food bowl. The puppy also had worms and lice. A local PetSmart took pity on the puppy-mill victim and treated him for free, Evans says.

Jim Evans had a Boston terrier as a teenager and wanted one for his children. “They’re a very loving, social breed of dog,” he says. Breeder Carol Enright says Boston terriers are an acquired taste. “They think they are a big dog in a small package,” she says.

Evans had known Eyring since 1991, when he taught Evans how to fly and they became friends. When the Evanses wanted to move back to Salt Lake City in 2002, they asked Eyring to look after Oscar. At that time, Eyring, then 33, was living with Dirker, 10 years his junior. They had met in 2001, Eyring says, “on the downside of my second marriage.”

In 2004, the Evanses moved back to Utah. They wanted the dog back. Dirker had become attached to Oscar. She and Eyring were going through problems. “Be patient with me a little while,” Eyring said to Jim Evans.

In September 2005, Dirker moved out. She wanted to take Oscar with her. Eyring told her she couldn’t. “She collapses in my driveway, balling with tears,” Eyring says. He says he thought they would get back together, so he let her take the dog.

By October, Jim Evans’ patience had run out. On Oct. 19 he went to Murray Police to file a stolen dog report. Murray Police told him it was a civil matter. The only way to get the dog back was for Evans to take her to court. Since Dirker lived in Taylorsville with her mother and stepfather, Murray officials advised Evans to contact Taylorsville police.

Later that day, Evans met a beat cop, Officer Blake Schroder, at Dirker’s mother’s residence. The cop went inside. Dirker had been on the graveyard shift and was asleep. Her stepfather told Schroder, according to the Taylorsville police report, Dirker “would not give the dog back because the dog was hers and Chris’s [Eyring] and he thinks Chris is trying to get back at her.” Schroder told Evans he “would have to pursue the situation through civil court.” Case closed.

Evans recalls what Schroder told him in blunter terms. “They’re not giving the dog back, they don’t want to hear any more about it,” he paraphrases Schroder as saying. “The gist was basically take it and shove it.”

DOGNAPPED
Over the next six months, Eyring tried to find a peaceful solution. A convert to Boston terriers, he purchased a female. He offered to pay for breeding and planned to give puppies to Dirker and the Evans. “Everybody wins in this deal,” he says.

Things, however, deteriorated between Dirker and Eyring. In March 2006, she filed a stalking complaint against him over an e-mail. Eyring says he told Jim Evans “all bets are off. Do what you want.”

On May 11, Jim and son Justin Evans drove by Dirker’s mother’s home. Antonia Lenning and her husband David were in the driveway with Oscar. Evans and his son got out the car and walked up to the Lenning’s driveway. The Lennings claimed Evans and his son came on to their property. Evans denies that. Either way, Oscar came running to them.

“Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite,” Antonia Lenning called out.

“I know,” Jim Evans said. He bent down, scooped the dog into his arms, then went back to his car and drove away.

When Jim Evans filed his stolen-dog complaint, the police told him it was a civil matter and conducted a “keep the peace”—essentially an attempt at mediation. When Dirker made the same complaint, she received a very different response. A week after Jim Evans took Oscar home, he and Det. Casey Davies began phone-jousting over the whereabouts of the dog.

Davies had clocked up nine months as a detective at Taylorsville when he started investigating the Evanses’ case. According to a 2001 article in the Taylorsville High School paper, The Warrior Ledger, for a while, Davies was the school’s police officer. He told the paper “his favorite part about his job are the adrenaline rushes during car chases and fighting off people.”

Veteran ex-Salt Lake County cop Morgan in his report for the Evanses’ civil case, focused on why Davies “pursued the retrieval of the dog as if he was a valuable commodity.” Ae also noted, “It can certainly be alleged that Detective Davies took a personal interest in this case because of his friendship with Andrea Dirker.”

Quite what their friendship may be is not clear from Morgan’s report. In court documents, Taylorsville City’s attorneys accept that Davies’ brother, Kip, worked

for Dirker’s mother Antonia Lenning and her stepfather David, providing security at their condominium’s board meeting. The attorneys denied, however, in those documents, plaintiffs’ allegations that Casey Davies also worked for the Lennings. Either way, Morgan noted, “it is apparent that good law enforcement practices and policies were not followed” in returning Oscar to Dirker.

For Morgan, how the investigation began sowed the problems that followed. “Shouldn’t ownership of the dog have been established prior to issuance of the [search] warrant?” He continued in his report, “At this point, it is only a civil dispute as acknowledged by Det. Davies and Taylorsville Police Department.”

Morgan noted Davies did not interview Chris Eyring, “a key figure in this case.” Davies also did not contact the Murray Police Department, even though he knew Evans had gone there with his original complaint. It wasn’t until the very day Taylorsville police descended upon the Evanses’ household that Murray Police received a fax from their westward counterpart stating, “We have a search warrant involving the ownership of the dog that is listed in this report. This would greatly help out our detectives.”

According to defense transcripts of conversations between Davies and Jim Evans, the cop told Jim Evans he wanted to keep him out of the court system. He also told him he’d screened charges—meaning sent them to prosecutor Howard Lengke’s office for review—on Jim Evans, his son, and his wife.

Davies admitted to Jim Evans that the dispute over the dog’s ownership was a civil matter. If he handed over the dog, Davies said, there would be no charges. That Davies was pursuing it as a criminal case came down to one thing—the value of replacing the dog. That value apparently also concerned the Salt Lake District Attorney’s office. Davies noted in one police report that the DA “wanted to make sure how much the dog was worth.”

According to a police report, Dirker told Davies she’d been looking for a female companion for Oscar and the cheapest she could find ranged between $600 and $700. On KSL.com, Boston terriers range in price from $300 to $800. These dogs, however, vary from the 11-year-old Oscar in two respects: They have papers documenting their purebred status, and they’re puppies.

Davies told Jim Evans he valued the missing dog at $600. “That’s how much it costs to get a new one right now,” he said. “So we figured we go the lowest amount.” Although Dirker and Davies may have put the dog’s value at $600, Jim Evans was charged with stealing an animal worth $300 or less.

Davies encouraged Evans to give up Oscar. “You have no criminal history, so I’m surprised that it had to go this far,” he told him. “I was hoping that we could keep your record clean and not have nothin’ on it.”

Evans wouldn’t bite. He accused Davies of being biased towards Dirker in his investigation. Davies wasn’t interested. “There’s a right and a wrong way to do things,” he told him. Evans, he said, had done it the wrong way. Evans told Davies not to show up on his property without a search warrant. A few days later, Davies did exactly that.

THE HEAT IS ON
“Our target is an 11-year-old black-and-white Boston terrier that goes by the name of Oscar,” reads the operation plan for the search and seizure warrant. It was signed by 3rd District Court Juvenile Judge Andrew Valdez on May 25, 2006. Conder and Eyring question why a juvenile judge would sign a search warrant for a dog. Court officials, however, point out that rather than this being a case of judge-shopping, in all likelihood, Valdez­­­—who did not respond to a call for comment—was the assigned judge for that week. Five detectives were assigned to the search, including Davies and Sgt. Rivera. Two other detectives assisted them. Rivera signed off on Davies’ plan. She then sent it up “the chain of command to Chief Larry Marx,” Davies wrote in a report.

They left Taylorsville police headquarters at 1:30 p.m., apparently without informing Salt Lake City Police they would be conducting an operation in its territory. This, Morgan points out, is at the very least a break in “common police practice.”

The operational plan reads like a briefing for taking down a dangerous suspect, rather than a flatulent pooch. “Once we off load we will approach the target from the west on foot,” the plan continues. “Containment will break off and work their way around to the rear of the house.”

Debbie Evans was in the driveway, on the phone to her husband, when she realized she was surrounded by Taylorsville’s finest.

“I was pretty angry that it had come to this,” Jim Evans says. “I was on the computer, trying to get a flight home, calling attorney friends to try and figure out what to do.”

Debbie Evans hesitated to let the police in the house. Davies pushed open the front door with his foot, according to a police report. The Evanses’ daughter, Alexandria, and a black-and-white terrier stood looking at them. The cops got excited. Debbie Davies told them to check the dog’s genitals. It was Eyring’s female terrier, Keiser, whom they were dog-sitting. One officer found a dog collar. Other than that, they drew a blank.

Police interrogated Alexandria, who broke down in tears. “I hope you feel good about yourself traumatizing a 12-year-old,” Jim Evans’ sister, Carol Phillips, told the police when she picked up her niece.

Police spied a boy leaving the Evanses house with a large cardboard box. This box generated intense interest. One detective, Marnie Montgomery, noted in her report, the box was “placed on the front passenger seat and the window rolled down slightly. Myself and Lt. Spann began to follow the vehicle, however due to traffic we could not get any closer that [sic] 5 cars from the target car.” A male took the box into a clothing store.

Montgomery and Spann went into the store and asked to look inside the box. “Carol Phillips began to argue with Lt. Spann stating that this was ridiculous and that we were scaring the kids.” Montgomery looked in the box. Rather than finding a tail-wagging—if long-in-the-tooth—hound, all she saw was clothing.

“We knew it was a civil matter, so we were protecting ourselves by moving the dog around,” Jim Evans says. His wife did not know Oscar’s whereabouts, he adds. After she was jailed, he arranged for the terrier to be handed over. At Salt Lake County Animal Control, the dog’s chip was scanned. The chip showed Oscar had been adopted by Debbie Evans in August 1999.

PISSING CONTEST
Once the dog was safely back in Dirker’s arms, so the legal process wound down. Charges against young Justin Evans were dismissed, despite Conder’s protestations. He wanted to show the judge just how ridiculous the situation was. Taylorsville prosecutor Miller also dismissed the charges against Jim Evans.

With the legal system apparently off their backs, all the Evanses wanted was their dog. “Our children were so excited to get Oscar back,” Debbie Evans says. “Now, that’s all taken away by some police officers.” They also wanted to punish Taylorsville Police. “We thought what they had done was fundamentally wrong,” Jim Evans says. “I don’t think anybody should have to be bullied by any police.” Conder filed his federal lawsuit in August 2006 with these two aims in mind.

If Jim and Debbie Evans thought that was the end of their legal nightmare, Taylorsville had other ideas. In February of this year Evans received solicitations from local lawyers offering to represent him on some charges. He threw the mailings away. When he received more, he checked with the court. At first he found no charges listed against him. Then he discovered his name had been misspelled on court documents. Not only had Miller filed charges against him, a warrant was out for his arrest.

Not that the new case required much effort on Miller’s part. He took the 2006 charging document, which still listed his wife, Lohra Miller, who was then co-prosecutor, changed a couple of dates and handed it in. Lorenzo Miller did not respond to an interview request.

Taylorsville City is represented by Salt Lake City firm Parsons Kinghorn Harris. A public records request to Taylorsville Police was referred to a lawyer with the firm, John Brems. In addition, he is also handling the civil case for Taylorsville, along with his associate Lisa Petersen. The only report Brems deemed suitable to release to City Weekly was Dirker’s complaint that Oscar had been stolen. Neither Brems nor Petersen returned calls seeking comment.

“Why now?” Conder demands to know about Miller’s change of heart. Where Taylorsville City has benefited is that the civil case is now delayed until the criminal matter can be resolved. He suspects Miller, at the behest of Taylorsville’s civil attorneys, of using his prosecutorial powers to punish Evans for exercising his rights to sue. This infuriates Conder. “My client has a right to sue Taylorsville City for violating his constitutional rights,” he says.

FOR THE LOVE OF OSCAR?
Like all shaggy dog stories, this one has a punch line—but not the one the Evanses wanted: Oscar died.

Boston terriers, breeder Carol Enright says, usually die at around 13 years. That might have been an easier end for Oscar. It turns out the day after Dirker got Oscar back, she scheduled him to be neutered at Brookside Animal Hospital as well as having a growth removed from his left ventral thorax. Enright says castrating a dog of Oscar’s advanced age poses “a definite health risk.” On June 11, Oscar was snipped. The vet’s report noted Oscar’s “declining condition since.” The dog came back into the hospital three days after the operation and was put on IV fluids. “He cries out in pain,” the report says. He had bloody diarrhea and vomited several times. Just before midnight on June 14, 2006, Oscar died.

“It almost makes me cry to look at the vet’s report,” Debbie Evans says. “When we turned him over to the police, he was playful.”

The Evanses now have two Boston terriers, Lilly and Shushu. Jim Evans’ pretrial hearing on the new charges is scheduled for June 29. The Evanses had always had a good relationship with law enforcement until this happened. Jim Evans called the police when students from a nearby high school roamed the streets during class hours. Now, every time Debbie Evans sees a Taylorsville Police Car her stomach lurches.

Jim Evans wants answers to questions he knows he’ll probably never get. Like why Detective Davies was so determined to get Oscar back, that, in Jim Evans’ opinion, “he shoved his badge around.” For Evans, Davies wasn’t just doing business, it was personal. His law enforcement expert Nick Morgan, in his report, agrees. “It appears obvious that, because of his relationship with the complainants, he abused his police authority to retrieve the dog for them,” he writes, resulting in Jim and Debbie Evans being “subjected to police misconduct and abuse of their constitutional rights.”

Given Oscar’s advanced age, plaintiffs’ attorney Conder says there was no crime because the dog was worth nothing financially, not to mention it was also the Evanses’ dog. Oscar’s value rested in the love of those who claimed him as their pet.

Despite his client’s embattled legal status, Conder is upbeat on the prospects for their civil lawsuit, even if it means biting the hand-in-blue that feeds him. “I think the only way to force a police department to really follow the law and police ethics is to teach them to respect what a citizen is due and sanction them appropriately when they don’t,” he says.