For more than 24 hours this week, West Linn police led a manhunt for a dangerous felon, enlisting a plane, police dogs, a boat and a drone.

They even put a local elementary school on lockout status.

Stay vigilant and lock your doors, they advised residents in a press release as the suspect remained at large.

What they didn’t say:

It was one of their own officers working the graveyard shift who lured the suspect, a convicted drug dealer living in Hillsboro, to town.

Arturo Garcia, 31, vanished in the Willamette section of the city late Monday and remained on the lam until almost midnight Tuesday.

The details of the bungled sting are spelled out in a police report written by West Linn Officer Dana Gunnarson.

The operation started on a “fake” Facebook account Gunnarson uses for police work, the report says. In the early morning hours Monday the officer received a “wave” from Garcia via Facebook. Gunnarson’s report says she’d never communicated with the man before.

The officer ran Garcia’s criminal background and saw a “felony caution warrant” for second-degree escape out of Washington County. That designation is intended to signal to police that the suspect has a violent history or may have weapons.

Earlier this year, Garcia was involved in a standoff with tactical officers in Beaverton, an episode that prompted the evacuation of nearby apartment units.

West Linn police reports show that officers determined “this would be handled as a high risk stop" given Garcia’s criminal history, according to a report written by another officer, William Snell, who responded to the scene.

Garcia, unaware he was communicating with a police officer, said he had drugs to sell. Gunnarson inquired about whether he had meth and heroin. Garcia said yes.

Gunnarson arranged for Garcia to sell her an ounce of meth for $300.

They agreed to meet Monday night in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in the Willamette neighborhood, the historic heart of West Linn. The neighborhood, located on a bluff over the Willamette River, has a charming downtown and a residential area of older homes.

Garcia, Gunnarson’s report says, made clear he wasn’t local.

It would take him about 45 minutes to drive to West Linn, he said.

Meanwhile, police officers working the overnight shift planned to take part in the sting, including a patrol supervisor, Sgt. Tony Reeves, and a Gladstone police dog unit.

According to the report, Garcia and the undercover cop planned to meet in a business parking lot in the Willamette neighborhood. Gunnarson noted that Garcia was standing outside of his car when Gunnarson pulled up, flashed her emergency lights and trained her spotlight on him.

Garcia, Gunnarson wrote, glanced over his shoulder and ran into the surrounding neighborhood.

That prompted a large-scale on-again-off-again search for the next 24 hours. Multiple residents reported seeing a man matching the police description of the suspect.

“He was a champion hide-and-seek player,” Officer Jeff Halverson, a spokesman for the West Linn Police Department, said Thursday. “We had K9s and the drones and so many police officers, but he was able to hunker down somewhere or keep moving and stay ahead of us.”

The tally: The Portland Police Bureau flew its plane to search for Garcia. Police dogs scoured the neighborhood. A rescue boat was called into service to search the Willamette River. Canby police flew their drone. Police officers from Lake Oswego, Oregon City, Gladstone and the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office joined the effort.

The search prompted authorities to put the local elementary school, Willamette Primary, on lockout status.

Garcia was located about 11 p.m. Tuesday a few blocks from where he was last seen by police.

He faces accusations of selling methamphetamine and remains in custody at the Clackamas County Jail.

West Linn police, in its press release about the arrest, said only that Garcia fled during a traffic stop. Nothing about why he happened to be in the city.

The department posted information about the search and subsequent arrest on its Facebook page and thanked West Linn residents for “their patience and confidence.” The posts generated praise and positive feedback from dozens of residents.

The police department’s spokesman maintained that Garcia fled from a traffic stop and declined to say why the sting was omitted in the press release, saying only that he couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation.

“But the good news is we did find him and eventually we picked him up,” he said.

West Linn police Chief Terry Kruger said that revealing the nature of the operation jeopardizes the department’s ability to continue to do these kinds of undercover stings via social media.

Still, the chief said he and his officers will consider whether the stings are a good use of resources. He said the search for Garcia was disruptive to the community.

“I acknowledge this is not the direction we wanted this to go,” he said. “We didn’t want him to get loose in the neighborhood.”

Kruger said his agency has had “relatively sizable” drug arrests this year through social media work. Since April, the agency has had 13 undercover operations that resulted in 18 arrests. He didn’t know how many involved suspects who live in West Linn.

He described the efforts as “good police work” that netted "people that otherwise would not have been apprehended or held accountable."

Michael Gennaco, a former federal prosecutor and police oversight expert and consultant, said police can use stings but "the question is whether it makes sense in this context.”

“That is a harder question but one that police agencies should be asking," he said.

Police should consider a range of factors before planning these kinds of operations, he said.

“Is it worth the resources? Is the location of the planned encounter safe for our community and what is the risk and reward calculation for our city?” he said. “Those are the questions public safety should be asking themselves.”

A local criminal defense lawyer, John Robb, questioned the use of public money at a time when law enforcement resources are stretched thin.

“I have never heard of a police force luring crime into their own backyard in order to crack down on it,” he said.

-- Noelle Crombie

503-276-7184

@noellecrombie

ncrombie@oregonian.com

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