The Mountain Eagle
WHITESBURG WEATHER

Letcher County will be under curfew from midnight to 6 a.m.Free Access

Sheriff Mickey Stines: ‘We’re trying to limit these dirtbags

Man carrying items from driveway

An unidentified man carries items from the driveway of a flood-damaged home in Whitesburg to load them into a waiting van. Letcher County Sheriff Mickey Stines said his office with “make an example” of people looting homes.

The Letcher County Sheriff’s Department and other law enforcement officers will enforce a curfew from midnight to 6 a.m. to stop the looting of homes affected by Thursday morning’s flood and a continuing power outage.
“People are just stopping in people’s driveways and picking up people’s stuff, and we’re not going to tolerate that sort of thing,” Sheriff Mickey Stines said.
The curfew will not apply to people traveling to and from work, or to emergency services personnel.
ATVs and side-by-sides will not be allowed out from sunset to sunrise.
Stines said he is working with state and federal authorities to get law enforcement officers from other areas to come to Letcher County to assist. He said he will deputize them and bond them.
“There are statutes that the judge can set a curfew, and he’s going doing that,” Stines said.
Citizens caught a man in a minivan loading up items from driveways in the Upper Bottom area of Whitesburg in the middle of the day, and there are reports of the same thing happening in other areas of the county and the affected region.
“We’re trying to limit these dirt bags, sorry, sons of bitches that are taking people’s things and we’re going to make a damn example of them,” Stines said.
The sheriff’s department is limited on transportation. Stines said his agency lost at least six cruisers, including two low-mileage Ford Explorers that were just purchased and had not yet been marked.
“They were $23,000 apiece and they were destroyed,” he said.
In McRoberts, where Stines lives, he commandeered an excavator parked by a power company contractor and neighbors who knew how to operate it built a bridge to replace the one washed away in the flood, using the culverts that had been swept down the creek.
“We talked to the company this morning, and they said they understood, they would have done the same thing,” Stines said.

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