Meth head finds a real crappy place to hide
It’s unclear how long Thomas Hovis Jr. had been hiding in a vat of manure, but when Noble County SWAT officers stormed the small barn where he was holed up, they thought they had lost the drug suspect.
The long, narrow barn has an open-air trough that runs along one side of the building and flows into a vat covered by a steel grate. The setup allowed the farmers who once used the barn to spray the animal manure from the floor into a holding tank.
Quote from the article:
| An officer looked down and there, through the steel grate in the floor, he could see the 52-year-old man, just his head peering out from the cesspool deep with frigid feces, said Chief Deputy Doug Harp of the Noble County Sheriff’s Department. “The pig operation hadn’t been in there for a while, but the previous tenant had been using it for dog kennels,” Harp said. Police believe Hovis had been using the manure pit for his dogs, too. Harp said he had no idea the last time the pit had been pumped out or cleaned. Hiding in a vat filled with liquid sludge might be a new depth for Hovis, but it wasn’t the first time he eluded police. In the 1980s, he fled to Florida, trying to escape a murder charge. Police eventually caught up to him when he was arrested after a barroom fight. In 1982, he was convicted of stomping a 40-year-old cabdriver to death in Fort Wayne and served 15 years in prison. About 6 p.m. Tuesday, the Noble County Special Operations Group – the county’s SWAT team – raided the farm at 866 W. U.S. 6 near Albion, where Hovis was living with his girlfriend. He was wanted on several warrants – including manufacturing methamphetamine and possession of a firearm – from Steuben County after he eluded authorities there, police said. |
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