SILVERDALE, Wash. — A Kitsap County man accused of causing more than $1 million in damage to a construction site faced a judge Wednesday. The alleged crime happened back in August near Silverdale.
After a more than three months-long investigation, the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office arrested the man at his home on Tuesday.
Court records show that one August night, someone gained access to machinery at the construction site for the Newberry Hill Road project. When crews came in to work in the morning, a retaining wall was heavily damaged, and several pieces of machinery were damaged as well.
“This was just brutal, not just smashing and ruining equipment, but the walls that were done, just ripping them apart,” said Tina Nelson, a Senior Project Manager with Kitsap County Public Works in the Roads Division.
Nelson said this caused more than $1 million in damage to equipment and caused even more money to be lost due to having to rebuild the wall. She added that this also impacted community members who had to wait an extra six weeks for the project to be done, having to take detours.
The culvert replacement project started in June and was supposed to be completed at the start of September before school started since the project was near a school. Due to the damage, the project was not completed until mid-October.
“Golly, we were a week ahead of schedule,” said Nelson. “And then this happens."
Aaron Childers, 40, a Kitsap County resident, was charged with one count of malicious mischief on Wednesday in connection to the crime.
Court records show that Childers was a former employee of the construction company that was working on the project.
“It's a violation of the community, right? The community was just all sorts of upset about what happened there,” said Lieutenant Ken Dickinson with the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office.
Dickinson said detectives considered Childers to be a person of interest from day one following interviews at the work site. At the site, they swiped for DNA evidence and took photos of a shoe print left on the window of one of the pieces of equipment.
In November, Childers was arrested for allegedly vandalizing a different former workplace. Detectives had his name flagged from the August investigation and when they went back to watch body camera video from the November arrest, they noticed his shoes.
“He was wearing the shoe, the type of shoe that they were looking for,” said Dickinson.
Dickinson said the shoes were sent to a crime lab and matched the shoe prints left on the scene, and he said the DNA was a match, too.
He also said Childers had keys in his possession that could have been used to operate the equipment at the construction site.
Childers’ bail was set at $250,000.