05:41 PM PST on Tuesday, March 2, 2004

By GARY CHITTIM / KING 5 News

TACOMA, Wash. - Police have arrested a man suspected to be behind an illegal boat sinking in Tacoma's Commencement Bay.

Simultaneous warrants were served by the Tacoma Police Department at the home and business of Vern Wadsworth.

KING Police believe Wadworth intentionally sank boats in the area around the Crows Nest Marina on Marine View Drive.

He was apprehended late Tuesday afternoon.

Police were looking for paperwork, computer files and anything to do with live-aboard boats that have somehow ended up on the bottom of Puget Sound. They have reason to believe Wadworth intentionally put them there in the area around the Crows Nest Marina on Marine View Drive.

An employee of Wadworth, Nicholas Stivers, agreed to take Washington state investigators to the precise locations where he took boats from of the Crows Nest Marina and sank them.

When asked: "Were you ever ordered to scuttle boats?"

He replied: "Yes."

"How many times?"

"More than 8 times."

KING Police used sonar and underwater cameras to find the wrecks.

Following Stivers' instructions, state ecology and natural resources investigators used sonar and underwater photography to zero in on the wrecks and before long they found them right where Stivers told them they were.

He said he did his work as secretly as possible.

"It seemed like it was important to do it in periods of restricted visibility, when it was dark, raining hard, foggy," he said.

But even in those conditions, other witnesses saw it happening.

"They knocked holes in it to make it sink...came back a little and they went over and did it again," said one witness.

The north end of Commencement Bay is anything but pristine, but millions have been spent to clean up the bay and sinking contaminated boats can cause serious ecological harm.

Stivers said Wadworth did not have him clean out the tanks and that there was fuel on board most of the time.

Why would anyone expose the bay and its creatures to these kinds of toxins? One theory is the owner was trying to avoid the high price of proper disposal of aging boats left by his tenants.

If police can link Wadsworth to the sunken vessels, seeping toxins into Commencement Bay, he will face a wide range of possibly serious criminal and definitely expensive environmental charges.

Police said the official charges against Wadsworth will depend on what divers find when they inspect the wrecks on the bottom of the Sound.

State agencies have spent countless hours and millions of dollars to remove toxic derelict vessels from Washington state waters. They plan to aggressively prosecute anyone caught adding to the problem.