During the ICE protest outside the Eugene Federal Building on Jan. 30, two individuals were arrested and charged with second-degree theft in what one defendant says was an effort to keep people safe.
Timothy Lewis, 69, and Benjamin Butler, 35, were arrested by Eugene Police Department officers at 9:39 pm Friday after an officer observed the two unloading City of Eugene Public Works street barricades from a truck near Oak Street and East Sixth Alley.
Lewis says he was responding to a friend’s call about pedestrians nearly being struck by vehicles on Sixth and Seventh avenues as protesters fled tear gas that had been deployed outside the Federal Building. The friend reported drivers were swerving and pedestrians were stumbling into traffic as tear gas obscured visibility.
At the Jan. 30 ICE out protest and again at a protest Jan. 31 at the Federal Building, Eugene Weekly and others documented protesters, media and others fleeing into the street as traffic was passing after federal agents fired tear gas and pepper balls into the streets and into a county-owned parking lot across the street where some had taken refuge.
“They told me they tried calling EPD to try to tell them what was going on, and they weren’t doing anything about it,” Lewis says. “They said they needed some help.” In a Facebook video of the arrest, protesters recount the event and raise the same concerns about traffic.
Eugene Police had declared the downtown protest a riot at 6 pm after windows at the Federal Building were broken. Federal agents deployed tear gas, pepper balls and flash-bang grenades throughout the evening, at times, firing tear gas canisters off federal property into adjacent streets, as Eugene Weekly previously reported.
Lewis had already left the protest that evening when he got the call. After hearing from his friend around 9 pm, he gathered cones and other barricades from a sidewalk construction site on West Third Avenue. Lewis, a videographer, had been documenting an effort to preserve trees near the sidewalk and knew that there would be equipment fit for a traffic blockade there.
He estimates there were about five or six pieces of equipment and says he intended to leave the cones and barricades for his friend to deploy as temporary traffic control. In an email to Eugene Weekly, EPD spokesperson Melinda McLaughlin noted that the equipment was property of City of Eugene Public Works.
According to McLaughlin, after the initial observation of the signs, officers stopped Lewis’s Toyota pickup truck outside of the Good Times Bar on High Street. Lewis says officers told him the stop was for a broken taillight and he was detained for 20 to 30 minutes before officers informed him he was being charged with second-degree theft.
When officers told him the charge, Lewis laughed. “I wasn’t stealing anything,” he says now. “I was just, you know, replacing them to a different location.” Lewis and Butler were arrested without incident and transported to Lane County Jail. Lewis was released on bail around 1 am. Butler is not currently in custody, according to Lane County Jail databases.
The Class A misdemeanor charge can result in fines up to $6,250 and up to one year in jail in Oregon. Both Lewis and Butler are scheduled for a March 3 pre-trial hearing.
McLaughlin declined to comment on a question about any reports of traffic safety concerns EPD received the night of Jan. 30, citing the upcoming trial.
Smaller protests, from singing vigils to SLUG queens, against the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the federal government are taking place almost daily in front of the Federal Building at 7th and Pearl.