Kentucky man arrested for local trailer thefts

As is the norm for UCSO investigators, Walker hit the ground running. He called up the Campbell County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Office, which was the agency that notified the victims that their property had turned up in the Volunteer State.

Walker learned that a man hauling an enclosed trailer and bike had visited a campground in the northern Tennessee county and attempted to sell the items to the campground owner: $2,000 for the trailer or $3,000 for the trailer and motorcycle. The items’ actual value is around $16,000.

When the campground owner started asking questions, the man unhitched the trailer and left it, but not before providing his phone number and Cash App account – just in case the campground owner wanted to make the purchase, Walker said.

Noting the suspicious activity, the campground owner called the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office, which responded to the scene and discovered that the items originated out of Union County in Georgia, some 160 miles south.

That’s when Campbell County authorities notified the real owners of the items, who traveled to the storage facility here to verify the theft. They then reported the incident to UCSO before driving to Tennessee to retrieve their property.

After speaking with investigators in Tennessee, Walker developed the name of a suspect based on the information provided to the campground owner. Next, he pulled up identifying documentation for the suspect: Jeffrey Kelien, 59, of Louisville, Kentucky.

In an attempt to connect Kelien directly to the stolen property, Walker followed the suspect’s recent vehicle movements using Flock license-plate reading cameras that picked up the stolen trailer tag heading north from Union County.

Taking a shot in the dark, Walker contacted another Tennessee law enforcement agency to ask a favor: would an investigator swing by a certain 24/7 convenience store on Kelien’s route, in Sweetwater, where he might have stopped overnight on his way to Campbell County?

The agency agreed and found what Walker was looking for – surveillance footage of Kelien driving a truck towing the stolen trailer and motorcycle. Additionally, the campground owner positively ID’d Kelien as the man who had attempted to sell him the items.

By then, Walker had been able to connect Kelien to the stolen belongings. However, Kelien had no known ties to Union County, and Walker could not yet place him locally at the time of the crime to develop probable cause that Kelien had been the one to actually steal the items.

Walker was in the process of getting a search warrant for records that could have placed Kelien here when a break came in the case, and quickly.

On Friday, May 22, two days after the initial theft became known, UCSO received a call about a man who had written a bad check for about $6,000 to purchase an enclosed trailer at an equipment retail business off K Creek Road.

The man had used his actual driver’s license information during the transaction. It was Kelien, and the date of the sale was May 19 – the same day the trailer and motorcycle had gone missing from the storage facility just down the road.

Walker immediately issued a BOLO, or “Be On the Lookout,” for Kelien, whose movements were known in close-to-real time thanks to the multi-county network of Flock Safety cameras.

They spotted him driving in Cherokee County, Georgia, that same day, and the Ball Ground Police Department pulled him over and took him into custody, Walker said.

The license plate for the stolen motorcycle was found inside his vehicle, alongside methamphetamine and a firearm. Kelien also had in his possession thousands of dollars in tools that traced to yet another victim in Whitfield County, Georgia.

Walker traveled to Cherokee County last week to interview Kelien, who confessed to his crimes in Union County. He told Walker he first came to Union County at the request of a third party who promised meth and money in exchange for an enclosed trailer from that specific business.

According to Walker, after acquiring the trailer, Kelien drove to a totally different storage facility that was to serve as the third-party dropoff. On his way out of town, he spotted the second enclosed trailer – the one with the motorcycle – and grabbed it.

“He said, ‘Well, maybe I can sell this one for either some more money or meth,’” Walker recounted. “But he couldn’t get in touch with his contact at that point, so he just decided he would start driving and try to offload it somewhere along the way.”

UCSO responded to the reported dropoff point and recovered the business’ stolen trailer. The investigation remains active, as Walker is now trying to establish if anyone else was involved in the crime, including the supposed third party mentioned by Kelien.

In Union County, Kelien is facing charges of two counts theft by taking, theft by deception and deposit account fraud. He is also facing charges in Cherokee and Whitfield counties and has a hold-for-arrest out of Lee County.

Still other charges could be coming, as Flock detected Kelien hauling different trailers through multiple areas of North Georgia and other states.

“At the conclusion of all this investigation, I don’t know how many more places we might be able to tie him into stealing stuff from, because this has been ongoing,” Lt. Walker said.

Kelien was still in custody at the Cherokee County Jail at press time. All individuals are presumed innocent until found guilty in a court of law.

Solving this case and getting an arrest on a non-local individual was made possible by a combination of good old-fashioned policework, modern technology, and the cooperation of multiple law enforcement agencies in two states, for which Lt. Walker and UCSO are grateful.