Like a Thief in the Night
It was a hot June day in 2025 and one of our Ponsse logging crews was busy loading log trucks out in the woods. It had been a long day, and they were loading the last load of the day. “That’s the one we’ve been looking for”, he thought. That is a common expression known to many a working man and women after a long day on the job. As the machine backed up the operator heard a “crunch”. “What was that?”, he thought as he stopped his machine. These machines are large and like any large tractor there are blind spots. When he got out to check what was going on he saw the skid steer that was directly behind his machine. He had accidentally backed into the side of it as it sat parked next to a tree. The damage was light, only a broken side window. Easy enough to repair they just needed to order a new side window from Caterpillar. “I’ll have it fixed in no time” he said.
It was going to take a week for the parts to come in, and at this time of year we can get those afternoon rain showers so he decided to bring the machine back to home base and park it under an old barn to keep it from getting rained in. That was June 18th. A week later the parts had finally arrived and when they went to get the machine to install the window, that’s when the awful discovery was made. The machine was not there. They could see tracks leading out to the wood line to the neighbor’s driveway. Being a skid steer, it leaves very distinct tracks as the machine skids every time a slight direction change is made.
A quick check of the GPS monitoring on the machine showed the exact time they dropped the machine off, 1:18pm on Wednesday June 18th. Mysteriously, the data also showed that the machine started at 8:47 pm that very same night. It also showed the machine starting at 9:32 pm the following night at the same location. (The GPS monitor records every time the machine is started and gives a precise location.) The last recorded GPS information shows the machine started at 10:46 pm on June 19th at an address in Greenwood, FL.
It is not hard to piece together the events that unfolded on those hot June nights. Someone “cased” the machine on the night it was parked to make sure the machine would start and run. The following night, June 19th, they came back with a trailer and stole the machine. Someone was knowledgeable enough to disable the GPS monitoring at the Greenwood address. Folks might think they were stealing from a big corporation. The reality is that Spanish Trail Lumber is a profit-sharing company and by that virtue what they were really doing was stealing form every single employee of Spanish Trail Lumber. The irony is that the night shift was working that night while the machine was being stolen from them. It is sad to think that while folks were working hard trying to make an honest living someone was stealing from them. I am told this sort of thing happens all the time, but it hits hard when it happens to you and the people you care about. There is no insurance on the mobile equipment. It is just a dead loss. Spanish Trail Lumber is offering a reward of $5,000 for information that leads to the return of the Caterpillar 289D3 JX908639 that was stolen from 6069 Old Spanish Trail, Marianna, FL on the night of June 19th, 2025. Anyone with information please contact the Jackson County’s Sheriffs’ Office at 850-482-9624 or Chipola Crime Stoppers at 888-804-8494. Ross Jackson, General Manager, Spanish Trail Lumber