Man Charged With Storing Dynamite Released On Bail

A north Spokane man charged with illegally storing 110 pounds of dynamite was released from the Pend Oreille County Jail on Thursday under unusually high bail and tight restrictions.

Bruce E. Taxter, 45, had to post a $25,000 bond, surrender a large collection of guns, remain under psychiatric care and agree to stay away from his wife and her state Department of Transportation co-workers.

Taxter also worked for DOT, helping arrange highway projects, until he took disability leave in November.

He also was required to surrender his concealed weapons permit and a card identifying him as a member of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Department’s Fairwood SCOPE organization. The group performs unarmed neighborhood patrols in the Mead High School area.

Taxter has no criminal history.

His attorney, John Rodgers, said Taxter had been under psychiatric care for about two years for “depression, anxiety and some friction with the Department of Transportation.”

Rodgers said DOT workers “are kind of tense” about Taxter “for good reasons or bad.”

Rodgers conceded there was probable cause to arrest Taxter, and worked with Prosecutor Tom Metzger for a week to hammer out the terms of his release.

Taxter was arrested March 23 at his father’s rural property five miles south of Newport after state officials got a tip that Taxter was storing dynamite there - despite having given a written statement that the dynamite no longer existed.

State troopers and federal agents accompanied investigators from the state Department of Labor and Industries, which regulates dynamite use.

Metzger said outside court that Taxter showed investigators around the farm, pointing out stumps he said he blasted with the dynamite. Agents were about to leave, Metzger said, when Taxter’s body language led them to believe the dynamite was being stored nearby.

At that point, Taxter helped the investigators recover two relatively new 55-pound cases of dynamite, three sticks of old and unstable dynamite and a separate cache of blasting caps, Metzger said. He said Taxter had a license to purchase dynamite for immediate agricultural use, but not to store it.

Taxter faces two counts of illegally storing explosives and one count of reckless endangerment for the old dynamite. He could get up to a year in jail on each count.

Taxter pleaded innocent to the charges and was scheduled for trial May 10.

“There must be more here than meets the eye,” Superior Court Judge Larry Kristianson said, noting the release conditions proposed by Metzger and Rodgers were unusually strict for a case with no “assaultive behavior.”

Metzger said he wasn’t prepared to accuse Taxter of planning an assault with the dynamite, but “we want to take the cautious approach.”