Wyoming State Trooper Kidnaps Trucker

Wyoming State Trooper Kidnaps Trucker

Wyoming State Trooper Kidnaps Trucker

I can't say that there's a whole lot that truly surprises me about the strangeness and cruelty that humanity inflicts upon one another, but every so often, there's an article that makes me wonder what the heck is going on with the world. The most recent cause for my mental reboot was an article in LandLine magazine, which reported that (among other strange tidbits of information) that a Wyoming state trooper had kidnapped a trucker.

Don't worry, no-one died. The article itself was an interesting read, however, and it's summary is pretty simple, though chilling - namely that Franklin Ryle Jr. arrested Richard Smidt, driving for Walmart at the time, for a fraudulent outstanding warrant, and had intended to use his truck to stage an accident with his family car that would have allowed him to gain punitive damages, and ultimately left the trucker dead. The reason that Smidt is still alive was apparently the fact that all Walmart trucks have GPS devices which would have "hampered" such a maneuver, and Ryle decided to release him.

It wasn't until investigators dug into the false arrest that any of the preceding information came to light, and Smidt justifiably asked for and received well over $100,000 from the state of Wyoming. Obviously, this could have been a tragedy of massive proportions, and I can only be thankful that Ryle was arrested and is now serving fifteen years in prison.

In reexamining this issue, I find myself struggling to find a positive direction to look at this in, but then it strikes me - a system is only as good as its most fragile point. To elucidate, I'm afraid I've chosen a metaphor that's a bit far afield. In the trucking industry, it is not uncommon for drivers to pay less attention to fatigue and wear to their trailer kingpin than on the fifth wheel it connects to. Much like crime, and the police that combat it, the two are linked, but it is much less common for people to be suspicious of the police, then the already shady criminal element.

With a kingpin being a solid piece of metal, most worry about the system failing comes from the clamps that secure it, the fifth wheel. However, if a bit of wear through bad circumstances should fall through the cracks, the potential for a tragic accident rises quite precipitously. In the case of a kingpin, the answer to the problem is simple, inspect everything regularly, and if wear is found, either perform a kingpin refurbishing, or perform a kingpin removal, and replace the entire assembly.

In the case of the Wyoming police department, I can't say which sort of solution is better, but one thing's for certain, with the amount of press that this has been shown to get, any action's better than nothing at all.

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