USU police recover stolen equipment from former employee

A former Utah State University employee was caught by campus police after allegedly stealing about $25,000 in computer equipment.

USU Police Capt. Kent Harris said while most of the equipment was recovered, some had already been sold or destroyed by 34-year-old Terry Trinkella, who worked in USU’s facilities department. 

Harris said Trinkella is being charged with four counts of burglary and five counts of theft.

The stolen equipment included monitors, hard drives, keyboards, memory, laptops and cables. The equipment was taken from multiple buildings on campus as well as South Farm and Caine Dairy, two of USU’s research facilities.

Harris said the department was made aware of the thefts two months ago, but the thefts could have occurred beforehand and gone unnoticed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We’ve recovered property that hasn’t even been reported yet,” Harris said. “We’re waiting for people to come back, fire up their computers in classrooms and notice their missing equipment. Then we can start putting pieces back in their locations.”

Harris expressed his gratitude to the security staff, USU’s Information Technology department, and to Detective Erik Christensen.

“He was putting things together,” Harris said. “Without his hard work and follow up, we wouldn’t have been able to recover a lot of this property.” 

Detective Christensen called the series of thefts a “perfect storm.”

“It’s this confluence of events that occurred that allowed this to go on,” Christensen said. “It was a USU employee who could hide in plain sight, and we had this pandemic where everyone’s been at home, so there were fewer people to notice things going missing.”

Christensen said at first the reports of missing items resembled thefts that occur every spring.

“At the end of every school year, we get a few thefts from seniors,” he said, “where people will say, ‘I’m leaving for good so I’m going to take this.’ We thought this may be what the thefts were.”

The thief was first noticed on surveillance video from the research farms. According to Christensen, the director at the farms saw a USU facilities vehicle on the property and thought it was strange.

“We kept an eye on that vehicle, got a few leads and tracked him down,” Christensen said. “Some members of our department noticed the thief walking by with a stolen computer under his arm. We tracked him on the cameras and saw him get in the same white facilities vehicle.”

After getting search warrants, the officers were able to recover the stolen equipment. 

Some of the officers are certified in computer forensics, Christensen said, so they were able to quickly see that the equipment was USU property instead of needing to send everything to a lab and wait for results. 

“We brought the thief in for questioning and he admitted to the thefts,” Christensen said. “He was very cooperative with us and made a list of where he’d been. Our total value of recovered equipment was $25,000.”

According to Christensen, it was lucky that he didn’t move much of it. With many budget cuts due to the pandemic, the university would have had to pay to replace everything. 

Christensen, who has been with the USU Police Department for five years, chuckled at the praise from Harris. Christensen said he was just doing his job and doesn’t need the credit. 

“Honestly, we would not have broken the case without help,” he said. “We have a small department so we had to pull people from patrol and security guards. The credit goes to the security guards. All I did was write the reports and talk to the suspect. Everyone else really pushed it and I couldn’t have done it without them.”

Harris said the police department, along with the university, is disappointed in the former employee’s actions. 

“His actions are going to affect not only the staff, but also the students in their learning behavior. With the pandemic, it’s going to limit their ability to learn because these parts have been stolen or destroyed. Now computers won’t work well on the first day of class,” he said.

He added Trinkella does not represent ”the university’s wonderful staff” as a whole. 

Harris said the public safety department wants students to take action when it comes to crime on campus. 

“If you see something, say something,” he said. “If something doesn’t seem right in an area, we want people to call us. We would rather respond to something that may not seem like a big issue as opposed to waiting and having it turn into a bigger issue.” 

—karcinrose@gmail.com

@harriskarcin