Police say the hard drive of a computer used by the suspect in the deadly ambush of Pennsylvania state police troopers provides evidence he has been planning an attack for years and preparing to avoid arrest.
State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens said a police inspection of the hard drive shows Eric Frein did Internet research on how to avoid police manhunts and on law enforcement technology and survival skills.
Bivens said Frein might now be treating the dragnet in northeastern Pennsylvania as “a game — a war game, if you will.”
Authorities believe they have Frein contained within a 5-square-mile perimeter around his parents’ home in Canadensis. They provided new details Friday, two weeks after a gunman opened fire at the state police barracks in Blooming Grove, killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and injuring a second trooper who remains hospitalized.
Frein has managed to elude hundreds of law enforcement officials looking for him in the thick woods around his parents’ home in Canadensis, taking advantage of the difficult terrain to keep them at bay. He is believed to be armed with at least one high-powered rifle.
“I suspect he wants to have a fight with the state police, but I think that involves hiding and running since that seems to be the way he operates,” Bivens said. “I expect that he’ll be hiding and try to take a shot from some distance from a place of concealment, as he has done in the past.”
Underscoring the danger they face as they pursue him, Bivens said Frein had
experimented with explosives, citing materials that police found and interviews with people who knew him. Trackers are proceeding through the thick woods as though they are booby-trapped, he said. Police think Frein might have a radio.
A police dog picked up Frein’s scent several days ago and flushed him from his hiding place. But the distance was too great, and Frein was able to get away, the dense canopy providing cover from a police helicopter overhead, Bivens said Friday.
As the search for the gunman neared its third week, Bivens said he remains confident police will catch their man — “at some point.”
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I’m kind of surprised that he hasn’t been tracked down yet, and it makes me wonder if he’s really still in that 5 square mile area, and if so whether he’s actually still alive.
We’ve had two large manhunts out here in Northwestern California in the last couple of years. Aaron Bassler managed to elude a massive manhunt in for more than a month, but that was a 400 square mile perimeter on much rougher terrain in a much more remote area. Then there was a huge manhunt for Shane Miller in similar terrain, but later it was found that he had been dead the whole time, less than 1/4 mile from his truck.
My initial reaction was that I was surprised that a dead person could be so much harder to find, given that the dead are generally stuck in one place, unless someone or something moves them. But it was pointed out that the advantage of being dead (if you can call it that) is that you can lie very, very still. In this case in PA I gather that they have had some evidence that this fugitive is still alive, or at least was not long ago. But the longer it goes that they don’t have any new evidence of fresh activity on his part, the more likely it becomes that either he’s slipped past their perimeter, or he’s dead.
Five square miles is a pretty big piece of woods, but the Pennsylvania state boys are serious professionals and I don’t think this guy will be running loose for long. Between the dogs and the infrared I’d say he’s pretty much trapped. He’s killed one cop and injured another from ambush; any resource the search team wants from any LEO agency around, they won’t have to ask twice for.
Plus which you can literally be cool—no more body heat to show up on infrared. As you point out being dead has drawbacks as well.
Hell hath no fury like cops hunting a cop-killer. They’ll probably find his remains after he does the math on his end-game.
It’s nearly October. When do the leaves fall in that neck of the woods?