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Official: MP fired at truck veering at him

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — Trespassers at Twentynine Palms, Calif., with a pickup loaded with spent brass casings also ended up on the receiving end of several bullets, officials said.

Members of a Special Reaction Team were combing the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center for three men who became stranded while allegedly stealing scrap metal from the sprawling desert base and called “911” for help.

During the search for the first group, Marines spotted a second group of trespassers in a pickup truck loaded with brass casings, base officials said.

Military police ordered the red Chevrolet pickup to stop, but the driver sped up and veered toward one of the Marines, according to base officials. The MP fired five shots from his service pistol at the truck, disabling it and spraying the male driver with shattered glass.

A man and woman in the second group were detained and cited with trespassing and stealing government property, said Capt. Neal Fisher, a combat center spokesman. The driver, who was taken to a local hospital for treatment for cuts, is expected to be charged when the investigation is completed.

The three stranded men in the first group were also detained and cited with trespassing and stealing government property, Fisher said.

Encounters with metal “scrappers” — who are not authorized to collect the scrap — are common at the remote live-fire training base, which covers 932 square miles of the Mojave Desert.

“We get folks stranded out here very regularly,” Fisher said. “We catch them on a very constant basis. We have scrappers on base on a daily passing.”

Spent metal, notably brass casings from weapons and used ordnance scattered on the military’s vast ranges and other federal lands across the Mojave, has been a popular lure for metal collectors who hope to recast it or trade it in for cash. Some scrappers, Fisher noted, could make $600 a day, so “that is obviously a draw.”

Rising prices for copper, brass and other metals on the recycling market have drawn more authorized metal collectors, but there are also growing reports of theft from illegal scrappers.

Hundreds of miles of some of the military’s largest training ranges are largely unfenced. But taking scrap metal from federal property without permission is a crime.

Twentynine Palms regularly collects the brass casings and other spent ordnance that litter the training ranges, sending it to the base recycling center, Fisher said.

“We would actually use all the stuff that they take,” he said.

The money made from the base’s scrap-metal recycling helps pay the salaries of the people who collect it, he added.

“[Illegal scrappers] are, no kidding, stealing from us,” Fisher said.

Scrappers stealing spent metal from bases face not just federal citations and fines but the danger of coming across unexploded ordnance.

“They don’t realize how often we patrol the area,” Fisher said. “Not only is it a crime, but there is a safety issue involved.”

Ten percent of all munitions fail to detonate, he added, and scrappers “are out there collecting this stuff” unknowingly.

Last May, a shoulder-fired rocket exploded in an apartment, killing two Barstow, Calif., men who were trying to remove the scrap aluminum, according to the local Desert Dispatch newspaper. Detectives told the paper they suspect the rocket might have been taken from nearby Fort Irwin.