For months, danger lurked on a dark road in the quiet coastal town of Kingston, Massachusetts. Rocks, some as heavy as 50lbs, started appearing in the middle of a rural road flanked by thick woods.
These rocks would be placed sporadically, “mostly during darkness”, each discovery appearing to involve one wayward rock. Sometimes, motorists would simply drive over the rocks without incident while at many other times, “vehicles’ undercarriages were being ripped out, causing fluid spills, disabling vehicles and even causing airbag deployments”.
“It became apparent someone was maliciously placing these rocks on the road to cause damage to vehicles,” the Kingston police department said in a Facebook post this week.
Investigators worried that far worse could unfold if this person wasn’t stopped. On Monday, an undercover detective sporting “full camouflage” lay in wait in the woods, braving torrential rain, to see whether the rock-leaver would emerge.
And he did.
Just before midnight, a motorist stopped, opened his railgate, and left a rock in the middle of the road. The vehicle then drove to a residence on a nearby street, police alleged.
Police approached the suspect on his porch, just 10 minutes after the rock was left in the street. No other cars had been on the road, police said.
The suspect, identified by police as Cameron Currier, admitted to driving this vehicle – which was “still warm to the touch”, police said. Currier, 31, also allegedly told police that he had just arrived home.
While Currier denied stopping on the street, he did not know that the detective had seen events unfold from the woods, police alleged. They arrested Currier.
In their announcement, police also claimed that Currier’s home is among “very [few] in the area that occupants would be able to hear the subsequent collisions and watch the emergency responses to the crashes caused by these malicious acts”.
“It was like a grenade went off,” said Austin Myette, one of the motorists who hit a rock, to the Washington Post. Myette, who thought the rock was just a paper bag until it was too late to change course, said his 2004 Toyota Corolla pulled the rock along the pavement.
After the rock loosened, damaging his car’s undercarriage, “the car pretty much did a wheelie in the air” and sputtered onto the side of the lane during the harrowing 8 August incident. As Myette left his totaled car to see what he struck, an oncoming minivan hit the rock.
The minivan swerved but the driver regained control and stopped. Myette had a concussion as a result of the accident and was “definitely a little messed up” for several weeks but has since fully recovered, the Post reported.
Currier’s attorney, Timothy Shyne, did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. Shyne did tell the Post that Currier “wholeheartedly denies the allegations” and described the evidence as “pretty thin”.
Following his arrest, Currier was arraigned on 11 counts of malicious damage to a motor vehicle, as well as nine counts of attempting to cause malicious damage to a motor vehicle, the Boston Globe reported. Currier pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Tuesday and was released on $1,500 bail, per WCVB.
