TUMWATER, Wash. — A portable sawmill, stolen from a Tumwater job site in August, has been found and returned to owner Brian Trembley.
Trembley estimates the value of the machinery is approximately $85,000. He’s spent nearly 20 years visiting locations in Washington and Oregon turning logs into lumber.
Trembley calls the saw his livelihood.
“Ecstatic,” said Trembley, who recovered the saw last Thursday, Sept. 7. “How else could it be to have your life handed back to you?”
After the theft on Aug. 22, Trembley went on local news broadcasts and social media sites pleading for help locating the sawmill. It was the social media posts, and a little sympathy, that brought the saw back to his life.
Trembley said he got an anonymous tip about the mill’s location from a person who was fearful for her safety after coming forward.
"A good person stopping a bad person,” Trembley said of the person who offered the anonymous tip. “One of the phrases she said, I remember it very clearly, ‘I am tired of seeing the bad people win.’”
Investigators with Thurston County Sheriff’s Office said no one has been arrested for the theft because the person with knowledge about it has not been willing to cooperate with authorities.