A man was arrested in Cortez on suspicion of stealing from a construction site after he was observed walking behind a wheelbarrow that carried a generator.
About 11:49 p.m. on July 25, officer Tyler Smith was dispatched to the Cedar Street area to look for a man who was seen pushing a wheelbarrow with a generator inside. The caller said she believed the man had taken the generator from Mesa Elementary School.
The woman added that the man appeared to be “tweaking” under influence of meth. At the corner of Jarrett Street and Juniper Place, Smith saw the wheelbarrow, which contained equipment used for concrete work.
When he got out of his patrol vehicle, Smith heard a banging sound from either a nearby dumpster or portable potty.
Smith called out to the man, asking him to come out. Eventually, the man, later identified as James Renninger, came out of the portable potty. “Covered in sweat, he was visibly shaking and he seemed out of breath,” Smith reported.
At first, Renninger denied being the one with the wheelbarrow, but he soon started changing his story.
“James was very hard to understand, he was speaking way too fast for me to comprehend what he was saying, as well as not making any sense and being off topic,” Smith said.
While observing Renninger, Smith noticed that his eyes were wide and his pupils were big, and that he seemed to have a “fresh injection site that may have been infected on his left arm.”
After hearing Renninger’s story several times, Smith said he began to understand what Renninger was trying to tell him.
Renninger said that he works and lives at Mesa Verde Hotel, though he also mentioned a potential home on Jackson Street to Smith.
He said his boss, “Mo,” told him to use the generator and to fix a broken window at the hotel.
“He claims he loaded the Honda Multiquip 5000 generator into the wheelbarrow, then pushed it all the way to Juniper and Jarrett to load up some wood from the construction site, that did not belong to him. He was then going to push it all to Jackson Street to get his tools, then push it all the way back to the Mesa Verde Hotel,” Smith said.
The caller said she saw Renninger pushing an empty wheelbarrow near Mesa Elementary, but when she drove by again later, the generator was in the wheelbarrow. She believed he had stolen the generator along the way.
He was arrested at the construction site.
The generator, valued at $3,700, and the wheelbarrow were taken to the Police Department lot so police can try to identify where they came from.
