Gunman confronts Toutle rest stop volunteers

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 5:12 AM PST

By Leslie Slape

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A Winlock couple volunteering at a freeway rest stop said a man waved a gun around early Sunday morning and told them he needed their car to drive to Mexico.

They managed to talk him into giving them the gun, which they hid in a cookie box, Lindy Plakinger said Monday.

"We were very, very lucky," she said. "You hear all the time stories of people who weren't so lucky."

The incident took place around 3:45 a.m. Sunday at the southbound Toutle River rest stop at milepost 54 near Castle Rock. Wolfgang and Lindy Plakinger were dispensing coffee and cookies to travelers to benefit home ministries for the St. Francis Mission Catholic Church in Toledo.

They told deputies they initially saw the young Asian man about 20 minutes earlier and when he told them, "I'll be back," they thought he meant he'd be back for coffee.

Instead, he returned with a jar of change and tried to give it to them.

"We said, 'Help yourself to coffee and cookies,' " Lindy Plakinger said. "He said God told him he didn't need that, but he did need our car."

He began wildly waving a gun around, she said. He never pointed it at them, but he put it to his temple once and they were worried he might kill himself, Plakinger said.

"He said, 'No, I wouldn't kill myself, I never would do that,' " she said. She said he seemed like "a nice fellow" and they were concerned about him.

The Plakingers, who were working in a brick shelter behind glass windows, asked him to put the gun through the window opening.

"He very nicely just put the gun in there," Lindy Plakinger said. "My husband grabbed it and I put it in a cookie box."

They then urged the young man to call his parents.

"That's when he picked up the cooler," stepped back a few feet and hurled it at the glass, she said.

"It was a little disconcerting."

She said she wasn't injured and her husband had only a few scratches.

Tim Rhodes, 24, of Portland was at the rest stop when he heard the glass breaking, but he didn't know what was going on.

Then Cowlitz County sheriff's deputies arrived and shone flashlights in car windows, including his Ford Focus, Rhodes said.

Rhodes drove out of the rest stop. Just as he reached 70 mph, he saw a man sitting in the middle of the right lane in the Lotus position, eyes closed.

"I thought I was going to just plow right through him," a still-shaken Rhodes said Monday. "I thought I was a dead man, 'cause there was a semi behind me. I was able to swerve. I fishtailed. I was shaking like a fish out of water."

He pulled onto the shoulder and called 911. He said he sat there for an hour before he calmed down enough to drive.

"Nothing has ever happened to me like that, ever," he said. "You expect to see a deer, but not a dude meditating."

Deputies located the man, 24, of Lakewood, Wash., walking along the freeway and took him to St. John Medical Center for mental evaluation. He was the same man as the one at the rest stop, deputies said.

Deputies have requested a court summons.