You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide

District Game Warden Zachary Schuchard

In late August of 2020 I was working a shift on the Missouri River in Bismarck.

It was late in the evening, well past dark, when I started to hear a loud boat motor coming towards me.

I turned to look at the boat and could see the navigation lights weaving back and forth.

Our two boats were the last couple of boats on the river for the evening.

The operator turned into the courtesy dock at the Fox Island boat ramp, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to perform a boat safety check.

These boat safety checks are routine checks performed by game wardens to ensure boats in operation have the necessary equipment required by state law.

These items include personal floatation devices, a type IV throwable PFD, a fire extinguisher, and a bell or whistle.

We check boats all summer for these vital pieces of safety gear in many different scenarios; sometimes at the ramp before people launch their boats, sometimes out on the water when the boat is in operation, and sometimes (like this case) at the ramp after returning from being on the water.

I pulled up on the opposite side of the courtesy dock as the boat was pulling up to the ramp, when I saw four people walking away from the boat and up into the parking lot.

One individual was in the process of backing a trailer into the water to load the boat.

After he got the trailer in the water, I went to conduct the boat safety check.

I talked with the operator of the vehicle who was also the owner of the boat.

I identified myself and told him I was going to conduct the boat safety check.

When asked for the PFDs, he climbed into the boat and retrieved five PFDs for five people that were on the boat.

He also had the throwable PFD and a fire extinguisher.

During the check, I noticed the registration on the boat was very outdated; in fact, it expired at the end of 2016.

Since our registration cycles are three years, he had missed an entire registration cycle and a year into the new one without current registration, I asked the individual for his ID as I was going to issue him a citation for the expired registration.

When he handed me his ID, the first thing I noticed was that it was a non-driver’s identification card.

This stood out to me because I had just witnessed him driving a vehicle and he didn’t hand me a driver’s license.

I asked him to wait for me in the ramp prep area while I returned to our boat to write his citation.

When I returned to the boat, the Morton County Sheriff’s Deputy I was working with asked me what the individual’s name was.

I told him and he goes “Oh! He has a warrant.” I got excited because a simple boat registration ticket was going to lead to an arrest for a warrant.

But then the deputy let me know that the Burleigh Morton County Detention Center wouldn’t take him on the warrant right now.

He had pulled the warrant for this individual the evening prior because he had gotten pulled over in Bismarck.

During COVID, there were some changes made to the detention center that made it to where if the offense wasn’t something involving violence or a felony level offense, the jail couldn’t take them.