In Tense Woods, Police Shift From Prey to Hunters

The Pennsylvania State Police recommend that you remain in your homes. That you not go into the surrounding woods. That you lock all doors and vehicles, keep the exterior of your home well lit, and if you see a shed open that you remember having closed, report it immediately.For more than a week now, an acutely personal manhunt has placed this stretch of the pastoral Poconos under psychological lockdown. A marksman believed to have assassinated one Pennsylvania state trooper and wounded another more than a week ago is still out there somewhere, in a forbidding, forested terrain stretching across dozens of square miles.
On Sunday, the state police announced some progress in their pursuit of the suspect, Eric M. Frein, 31, whose otherwise unremarkable face appears on billboards and posters throughout the area. Lt. Col. George Bivens said that trackers had discovered a few items that the suspect had abandoned or stowed away in the wooded shadows, including a military-style rifle and some ammunition.

“We are pushing him hard,” the state police official said, adding, “We believe we are closing in on him.”
This is welcome news to a region in which everyday routines have been altered or abandoned. Classes, football games and even Sunday church services have been canceled. In a way, so has September: One township called off its Scarecrows in the Park festival “in light of recent events,” according to a local newspaper.
Among those on edge are the ones issuing the terse recommendations: the police officers themselves. The man they are seeking is described as a survivalist and an excellent shot, with a loathing for law-enforcement officials.
The intimate tenor of their hunt was established early on, when Colonel Bivens addressed Mr. Frein directly last week: “Eric, in the event you are listening to this broadcast on a portable radio, while cowering in some cold, damp hiding place — we are coming for you.”
Since then, most interactions between the police and residents — and with the many reporters, photographers and videographers about — have been cordial. On Sunday, a state police officer stopped his S.U.V. to ask a reporter, simply: “Are you O.K.?” But there are times when frayed nerves are exposed

Eric Frein, the suspect.


Paul Keat, 42, a local man in a camo jacket and a baseball cap, smoked a succession of cigarettes as he recalled trying to return to his home on Friday, only to find his hilltop neighborhood cordoned off by the police. But he knew a back way, he said, and he took it.

After he got out of his pickup truck, Mr. Keat said, a police officer — “I would say on edge” — tossed him to the ground, handcuffed him, and ran an identification check. But the two men managed to have a brief conversation before Mr. Keat was escorted home.

“We’re looking for somebody who killed one of our own,” Mr. Keat recalled the officer saying. And Mr. Keat recalled responding: “I know why you’re out here.”
Here, according to a police affidavit, is why:
Late on the night of Sept. 12, Cpl. Bryon Dickson, 38 years old and the father of two young sons, was ending his shift. As he walked out of the Blooming Grove barracks, a neat, tan-brick building nearly surrounded by woods, he suddenly dropped to the ground.

A colleague who was just beginning her shift heard a sound like a firecracker, saw Corporal Dickson on the ground — a few yards from flagpoles flying the American and Pennsylvania flags — and went out to help, only to hear another shot that kicked up a cloud on the lobby floor.

She retreated into the building and tried, unsuccessfully, to call 911. Her wounded colleague asked her to bring him inside, but she could not reach him. She called out for assistance.

Trooper Alex Douglass, also just beginning his shift, walked up from the parking lot toward Corporal Dickson. He, too, fell to the ground, shot, but crawled to safety into the lobby. Using bravery and the shield of a marked S.U.V., other troopers managed to carry their brother into the barracks.

Ninety seconds had elapsed, and four shots had been fired from a wooded area across the street. Corporal Dickson was killed, and Trooper Douglass was seriously wounded. A manhunt began.Three days later, a resident walking his dog through the woods came upon a Jeep Cherokee, apparently abandoned and slightly submerged in a pond.

A search of the car — owned by a Canadensis couple, a retired Army major named E. Michael Frein and his wife, Deborah — found identification belonging to their son, Eric, as well as some telltale effects: camouflage face paint, two empty rifle cases, military gear, information about foreign embassies, and two cartridge casings matching those found outside the barracks.

The suspect apparently took two guns, a military-style rifle and a .308 rifle with a scope, from their home, but left behind a book about sniper training. One more thing: According to the elder Frein, his son “doesn’t miss.”

Since then, details about Eric Frein have emerged. He belonged to a military simulation unit in which he role-played as a Serbian soldier. He appeared as a German soldier in a short movie about the Holocaust. And according to Colonel Bivens, he spent months, maybe years, planning “his attack and his retreat.”

A retreat into the woods: hundreds of miles of hemlock and maple, oak and hickory, interrupted here and there by swamps and creeks, gorges and empty cabins, with terrain so uninviting in some places that even seasoned hunters won’t venture there. It can be a secret place.
“His backyard,” Colonel Bivens said.

Many of the law-enforcement officers involved in the hunt come from elsewhere: state troopers from New York, F.B.I. agents and even some of Pennsylvania’s own troopers more accustomed to the rhythms of, say, Pittsburgh, than to those of the forest. But they have been pushing through the woods nevertheless, on edge perhaps, but with rifles and body armor.

Their manhunt, which began outside the Blooming Grove barracks, seems to have narrowed to an area 20 miles to the southwest, to a densely wooded stretch just outside of Canadensis, where Mr. Frein’s parents live.

Throughout the day Sunday, the state police established checkpoints at the edge of residential neighborhoods with idyllic names, while patrol cars and S.U.V.s moved up and down the winding roads, sometimes crawling, sometimes speeding

A resident of the area, Mike Lewczak, expressed a desire for normality’s return. In the meantime, he said, he wondered whether he had ever seen Mr. Frein, given the sparse population and his own proximity to the Frein home.“The face looks familiar,” he said.

But Mr. Frein, who is 6 feet 1 and about 165 pounds, may look markedly different now, his head shaved tightly on both sides, and what’s left of his brown hair long on top, and wider than a Mohawk.

Although hunting season has yet to begin, Colonel Bivens asked hunters who have set up trail cameras — used to track the habits of deer — to review any images they might have recorded for views of Mr. Frein or other suspicious activity.

But the state police reiterated their words of caution. Lock your doors. Keep the lights on. And until further notice, please stay out of these dark, enveloping woods.

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