ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050034
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
Deputy Damon Parkhurst takes it personally when he thinks a shipment of drugs has gotten past him on Interstate 40, which runs for 51 miles through Oldham County, Texas, and on which he conducts "narcotics interdiction."
There's not much crime in Oldham County, population 2,278, and the popular coast-to-coast highway gives the five-man Sheriff's Department most of its drug arrests.
It was here that the deputy who once let Reginald "Rudy" Booker go with a speeding ticket waited for the chemist to pass through his territory again.
The first time Parkhurst encountered Booker and his cousin Ivery Yelverton, the two men were heading west with a rental car and an empty trailer they said they were using to move Booker's things to Richmond. Parkhurst gave Booker a speeding ticket and confiscated his three-weeks-overdue U-Haul at the request of the rental company.
About a week later, the deputy said, he got a call from a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Los Angeles who had been keeping tabs on Booker and discovered that Parkhurst had stopped him.
The DEA promised to call when Booker and Yelverton were heading back east so Parkhurst could have a shot at arresting them.
He got the call in July - but a dispatcher forgot to give him the message for more than a day. Parkhurst figured he had missed them.
He hit the highway and stopped to ask a roadside cattle inspector if he had seen a gray Econoline Van pulling a U-Haul pass by. But before he could describe the van, he said, he looked up to see Booker and Yelverton cruising past him, heading east.
"In probably a million cars a day, I found them," he said. "It was pure luck."
If Booker and Yelverton had obeyed all traffic laws as they passed through Oldham County, Parkhurst would have "followed them for 51 miles and waved goodbye" at the county line. But Yelverton, the passenger, was not wearing his seat belt.
Parkhurst pulled them over, and he said they gave him permission to look in the trailer.
The furniture they said they were moving to Virginia "looked like it had been drug out of the dump." The beat-up white couch with no cushions, tattered love seat and orange foot stool would have all fit in the back of Booker's van, the deputy said, but they had rented a trailer to haul it.
"You're all traveling 2,000 miles to deliver this s---?'' Parkhurst asked them. "It ain't worth the cost of the U-Haul."
Amongst the furniture, court records say, were 14 gallons of piperidine and five gallons of cyclohexanone, controlled substances the DEA says can be used to make PCP.
Handling the chemicals gave him a headache for three days, Parkhurst said, and sent his partner to the hospital. But being involved in the biggest bust the Oldham County Sheriff's Department has ever had was worth it. "I get a bigger high off dope than [users] do," he said.
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