Molalla Police Department arrested a suspect in a failed burglary attempt this afternoon. Shawn Chapple, 40, confessed to using a metal plumbing fixture to smash the back window of a house on North Cole Street near Clark Park.
Unfortunately for him, the house was not empty.
Nicole Jesser-Smith, a stay-at-home mom, was at home on her normally quiet street while her 3-year-old son napped in the bedroom at about noon, when someone rang the doorbell. She didn’t answer, but a few minutes later, a loud crash from the back side of the house caught her attention. She went to investigate and found herself face-to-face with a man wearing a work jacket, still holding the screen to the window he had just smashed.
“I heard a crash and I came down the hallway and stood in the middle of the living room and said ‘What the hell are you doing?’” Jesser-Smith said. “He saw me and he dropped the screen and ran.”
Although she was scared, she was also angry.
“I was pretty frightened,” Jesser-Smith said. “At the same time, though, I’m standing there in my living room looking at this guy like ‘What are you doing? I don’t have anything you want.’”
Before she thought of calling 911, she called her husband and her brother to tell them what happened, upon which, they told her to call the police.
Molalla Police Department officers responded to the scene with their canine unit and began combing the area in search of the suspect. In the meantime, Molalla High School went into lockdown mode in case the man tried to enter the school.
Officers detained one man fitting the suspect’s description on the 900 block of east Main Street, but upon bringing Jesser-Smith to the scene, she told them they had the wrong person.
Shortly thereafter, officers found the plumbing fixture the suspect had used to break the window on the northeast end of Clark Park.
A little after 1 p.m., MPD’s canine found Chapple hiding in the bushes behind the Molalla Buckeroo Grounds. It was the first time the new police dog, nicknamed “Z”, had tracked down a suspect for MPD.
“We would not have done this without the dog,” Long said.
He came out and immediately confessed and complied with the police, according to Officer Steve Long.
Chapple told police that he was looking for money, Long said; he had believed the house was empty and found a piece of metal with which to break the window.
Long said the burglary was not part of a general crime trend.
“This is rare,” he said. “This is a random occurrence.”
Chapple was arrested and lodged in the Clackamas County Jail where he is being held with bail set at $111,000 on charges of first-degree burglary and second-degree criminal trespass, as well as on preexisting charges that had led to warrants being issued for his arrest, including seven counts of contempt of court and two counts of failure to appear. Chapple had been arrested previously on charges of driving under the influence of intoxicants, interfering for a police report, menacing and harassment, failure to appear and contempt of court.
— Abby Sewell
