Howard County deputies will travel to Arizona next week to pick up a man who dodged them for a decade.
“We got him,” said Howard County Sheriff Jim Fitzgerald. “We used the resources in the sheriff?s office; we tracked him down and we?ll drag him back to Howard County.”
Police in Phoenix, acting on a request from the Howard Sheriff?s Office, nabbed Gilbert Blackman, 57, who went on the lam in 1996 after violating probation stemming from a child abuse conviction, said Sgt. Charles Gable, a Howard Sheriff?s Office spokesman.
Blackman will be charged with violating his probation.
Howard Sheriff?s Office investigators found Blackman?s driver?s license while sifting through a computer database, Gable said.
The license bore his real name, but the address was either false or outdated. A group of plainclothes police found him at his girlfriend?s house in Avondale, a suburb of Phoenix, and arrested him without incident, said Sgt. Joel Tranter, a spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department.
“He was very astute in avoiding law enforcement these past 10 years,” Tranter said. “You have to work hard to stay off the grid ? and it?s a big grid these days.”
“Today, you can?t operate without a state-issued ID or a driver?s license,” Gable said.
Blackman?s was the oldest bench warrant held by the Howard Sheriff?s Office.
He was convicted of child abuse in 1983 and served six months in Howard County Detention Center.
Gable said he violated the terms of his probation, fleeing before completing court-ordered sessions with a psychiatrist.
He surfaced briefly in 2004, after another database search turned up a workers? compensation lawsuit he had filed in Oklahoma, but he never appeared in court.
The state?s attorney is expected to ask the court to revoke Blackman?s bond.
