Men Charged with Stealing Thousands of Pounds of Scrap Metal from Eagan Businesses

An Oakdale man and a St. Paul man have been charged with theft after authorities say they conspired to steal thousands of pounds of scrap metal from businesses in Eagan and elsewhere in the Twin Cities and sell it to recyclers.

Thomas Richard Wybierala, 48, of Oakdale and James Robert Woller, 43, of St. Paul each face a charge of felony theft, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Wybierala and Woller are scheduled to make separate first appearances on the charges Oct. 31 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.

According to the criminal complaints, an employee of a business on Collins Drive in Eagan reported to police on Sept. 4, 2010, that someone had removed a heavy cover from a scrap bin and taken 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of brake drums, brake pads and miscellaneous scrap metal.

Three days later, a business on Apollo Road in Eagan reported to police that on Sept. 5, someone had pulled up to the back of the building before daylight and taken a 40-yard roll-off dumpster filled with $1,000 worth of scrap metal. Employees provided a copy of a surveillance video that showed a red roll-off dumpster truck pulling up to the dumpster, and a man loading the dumpster full of scrap metal onto the truck.

The truck on the video returned to the business three hours later and replaced the empty dumpster.

An Eagan officer who had family members in the roll-off business in St. Paul was asked to look at the surveillance video. He in turn asked family members, who said the truck was known to park at a scrapping junkyard off Phalen Parkway in St. Paul.

Eagan police set up surveillance of the scrapyard. On Sept. 14, 20120, an officer observed a red roll-off truck matching the one in the video parked in the scrapyard’s lot, with a man sanding a fiberglass fill on the passenger-side door.

The man was identified as Wybierala, and he told police he owned the truck and that it had been parked on the lot for a week. When police asked him why he was repainting the vehicle, he said he was starting up a new business and wanted to change its color.

“(Wybierala) gave additional contradictory and conflicting information about what had been done with the vehicle in the previous week,” the complaint notes.

When police showed Wybierala a photo of the man in the surveillance video, he identified him as Woller, who he said had borrowed the truck to help a friend move.

Wybierala told officers that Woller’s father owned the scrapyard and allowed him to store his truck there. When Woller’s father arrived, he told police that Wybierala and his son had taken the hood off the roll-off truck the night before and put it on another truck.

When police showed Woller’s father a photo of the man in the surveillance video, he said, “Yep, that’s my son. How come you guys keep letting him out of jail?”

Eagan police learned that Wybierala had a history of selling scrap metal at recycling companies and scrapyards around the Twin Cities for months.

The records at a recycling center in Hugo showed that Wybierala, a regular customer, had been paid almost $8,500 for scrap metal since February 2010, with the most recent transaction on Sept. 7, 2010, when he made two visits to the business and sold 23,000 pounds of sheet iron, 5,120 pounds of automotive rotors, 200 pounds of cast iron and 9,240 pounds of scrap.

Employees at the Hugo business told police that Woller always accompanied Wybierala when he came to sell scrap metal.

Police found Wybierala’s car parked at his girlfriend’s home on Oct. 22, 2010, and got permission from the woman to come in and look for him. While police were searching a closet under the stairs, they spotted Wybierala’s feet sticking out of a cubbyhole; he came out of the closet and was arrested.

Woller was convicted in 1998 of receiving stolen property and in 1994 of first-degree drug possession, for which he was sentenced to almost seven years in prison. He was also convicted of false imprisonment and domestic assault  in 2003, check forgery in 2005 and third-degree burglary in 2010.