A man believed to be the “Red-Bearded Burglar,” a North Coast fugitive for nine months, was caught by sheriff’s deputies Thursday after a foot chase in the forest near Albion.
William Allan Evers, 40, is a suspect in a series of home burglaries since February in Mendocino County. He is also thought to have shot at deputies investigating an intruder at a cabin in May.
His capture came a day after a resident reported seeing the man defecating in the woods near Albion Ridge Road. Deputies who responded said they saw him from a distance late Wednesday afternoon but he eluded them.
When they were searching the same area of the Salmon Creek Forest on Thursday morning, Evers walked out of the brush only eight feet away from them, said the account from the Mendocino County sheriff’s office. He immediately turned and began running. A sheriff’s deputy released a dog, Takota, who knocked the fleeing man to the ground within about 50 yards.
Even when he was caught and handcuffed, he attempted to flee, the deputies said, so he was put in a leg-wrap restraint for transport to the sheriff’s office.
His smile in the patrol car photo came after a deputy told him of a nearby Halloween display that included a red-bearded jack-o’-lantern apparently depicting Evers, Sheriff Matt Kendall told the news blog Mendo Fever.
The sheriff told Mendo Fever that his department had dialed back its search after realizing that the burglar did not seem violent; the alleged shooting, they believed, “was a one-time thing.”
“If we were going to be ruthless, we would have caught him in 10 days — five snipers, rotate them — but that would have been a homicide,” Kendall told the publication.
In early September, deputies surrounded a cabin where an alleged burglar was holed up but the intruder managed to sprint from the home and disappear into the woods in the pre-dawn hours. A few days earlier, a resident had confronted a man of Evers’ description taking onions and beets from a garden near Albion.
Evers is a suspect in residential burglaries in Albion, Elk and Philo. At least twice residents who were out of town saw a man inside their home after getting a security camera alert.
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