By Rachel Cook and Sven Berg
Idaho Falls Post Register
After three hours of surrounding an Ammon apartment building Thursday night, police came away empty-handed in their search for a man suspected in a string of police impersonation cases.
Law enforcement officers are searching for 18-year-old Damian Bird, whose latest offense was allegedly threatening a man with a gun Thursday at a storage facility in Ammon. Police said they believe Bird also told a 19-year-old man Wednesday night that he was an undercover police officer. Bird then drove the man around town and ultimately tricked him into withdrawing money from an ATM to pay “fines.”
At 5:35 Thursday afternoon, two witnesses told officers that a man matching Bird’s description pulled a gun on a man in Ammon, Bonneville County Sheriff’s Sgt. Jeff Edwards said.
The victim told police that as he drove from his Eve Drive home, Bird pulled up behind him in a green Saturn and started flashing his headlights. The victim stopped and Bird approached him and put a gun in his face and asked for ID, police said.
Edwards said the man gave Bird his ID, which Bird looked at and threw back in the victim’s car. A witness copied Bird’s license plate number.
About 10 minutes later, Edwards said, a deputy spotted Bird’s car arriving at the Palisades Park Apartments in Ammon. But in approaching the parked car, the deputy briefly lost sight of it, and when he arrived it was empty.
As more officers arrived and set up a perimeter around the apartments, a neighbor told them Bird regularly entered one of the apartments through a rear window. Over the next three hours, as many as 27 deputies responded to the scene, with SWAT team members and snipers taking up position all around the apartment where Bird was believed to have holed up.
Edwards said officers evacuated two neighboring apartments and then entered the apartment between 7:15 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Before entering the apartment at 7:30 p.m. officers fired three bean bag rounds through the apartment’s rear windows.
By 9 p.m., they concluded Bird was not in the apartment and was nowhere to be found. As of press time, officers were still searching for him.
Bird has experience impersonating law enforcement officers. In July 2010, he was convicted of impersonation after he pretended to be an immigration officer and extorted $20 from a Hispanic man. Between January 2007 and July 2010, Bird was charged on five separate occasions for impersonating authorities.
In Wednesday night’s case, 19-year-old Morgan Wilson told Idaho Falls police he left his job at Cold Stone Creamery at 10:45 p.m. A man in a blue-green Saturn - matching the description of the car that arrived Thursday afternoon at Palisades Park Apartments - followed him, flashing the car\'s lights. Wilson eventually stopped in the parking lot of Taco Bell on 25th Street.
“At first I thought it was a friend of somebody flashing their lights at me,” Wilson said.
The suspect identified himself as an undercover juvenile deputy. He said Wilson was in trouble for loitering and traffic violations.
Wilson said the man became angry when Wilson said he had not yielded to him because the Saturn didn’t have police lights.
“It just didn’t add up even from the beginning,” Wilson said. “(I was in) defensive mode after that. This guy was mad - really, really mad.”
Wilson got out of the car at the man’s request, and the fake officer frisked him. Wilson said he did not physically resist but asked what the man was doing as he held Wilson’s wrists as if he were going to handcuff him. He then put Wilson in the back of the Saturn.
“He was so convincing that he was a cop and that I had screwed up,” Wilson said.
Once in the car, the man drove Wilson through neighborhoods and business parking lots pretending to talk through an earpiece to “the captain” using police jargon.
The man stopped outside the Bonneville County Jail, telling Wilson he was heading to jail. Wilson said the man told him he owed $400 for fines, calculating the total on a Droid tablet.
“I was not going to argue with this guy because he kind of gets set off easily,” Wilson said.
The Saturn driver took Wilson to a bank. The police report said Wilson withdrew money from the bank’s ATM and gave it along with cash from his wallet to the driver. The phony officer said he would come to Wilson\'s house in the morning for the rest of what he owed, IFPD Sgt. Phil Grimes said.
The driver dropped Wilson off at his car, according to the report.
Grimes said the incident is likely connected to yet another case of police impersonation Tuesday. Police were called to Cell Again in the Grand Teton Mall at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday after a man impersonating an officer took a Droid phone.
A store employee told police the man claimed to work for the police and Verizon Wireless. Grimes said the suspect spoke in an ear piece and quickly flashed ID on a lanyard. He asked to see a Droid and said it was stolen, the report said.
He left with the Droid.
“Somebody impersonating a police officer doesn’t come up that often,” Grimes said.
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