A long-haul truck driver is in custody awaiting extradition to Washington state after police say he spent a December night hunting women and children in a central Washington college town.
The case fits a pattern the FBI has been tracking for over two decades.
The Ellensburg Police Department announced this week that the 35-year-old suspect, a Mexican national employed by an Arizona-based trucking company, was arrested on January 6 while attempting to cross into the United States through an Arizona port of entry. An arrest warrant had been issued on December 31 based on surveillance footage and license plate reader data that connected a blue semi-truck to multiple incidents on the night of December 22, 2025.
Police have not publicly identified the driver or the motor carrier involved. The investigation remains active.
The incidents began around 1 a.m. on December 22 when Ellensburg police responded to a harassment call near South Canyon Road. Four middle school-aged girls reported being approached by a man driving a blue semi-truck without a trailer.
According to police, the driver stopped in the roadway near a McDonald’s and attempted to lure the girls into his vehicle. When they refused, he followed them on foot until they ran and hid. He eventually gave up and drove away.
After police shared information about the incident on social media, additional victims came forward.
One woman reported that earlier that same night, the same suspect had grabbed her in the 2000 block of North Walnut Street and ordered her to get into his truck. She managed to break free and escape. After the encounter, she reported hearing another woman yelling at the driver.
A third witness reported seeing the suspect approach two women near North Main Street. According to police, he followed one of the women at a fast pace into an alley before a male bystander intervened and interrupted whatever he had planned.
Surveillance footage confirmed the same blue semi-truck was present at all three locations. The truck was last captured heading eastbound on Interstate 90, leaving the Ellensburg area after the incidents.
The Ellensburg case may seem like an isolated incident, but it fits a pattern federal investigators have been tracking since 2004.
That year, a crime analyst with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation noticed something disturbing while reviewing unsolved murders: bodies of women were turning up along interstate highways at an alarming rate, and many of the suspects were long-haul truck drivers. She contacted the FBI, and the Bureau launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative.
The numbers are staggering. According to former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi, who spent a year embedded with truckers researching the initiative, the FBI has linked more than 850 murders to long-haul truck drivers over the past few decades. Two hundred of those cases remain active and unsolved. The Bureau is currently tracking approximately 450 suspects within the trucking community.
The victims follow a pattern: women picked up at truck stops, sexually assaulted, murdered, and dumped along highways, often hundreds of miles from where they were last seen. Many were involved in prostitution or sex trafficking. Others were hitchhikers or stranded motorists.
What makes these cases so difficult to solve is the mobility that trucking provides. As the FBI has noted, an 18-wheeler is essentially a mobile crime scene. A driver can grab a victim in one jurisdiction, commit the crime in a second, and dump the body in a third, all in the same day. Local police investigating the case may have no idea that similar crimes have occurred in other states.
The Ellensburg suspect was not accused of murder. He is accused of attempted kidnapping and luring, charges that will be filed once he is extradited to Washington state.
But here is what investigators who study predatory behavior know: this kind of conduct rarely starts with murder. The pattern of targeting multiple women in a single night, the use of a commercial vehicle to approach victims, the immediate flight across state lines and international borders, these are the behaviors that precede escalation.
Figliuzzi, in his 2024 book “Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers,” described the psychology that draws certain predators to trucking. The isolation, the anonymity, the constant movement across jurisdictions, create what he called “a license to kill” for those inclined to exploit it.
The vast majority of the more than three million truck drivers in the United States are exactly what they appear to be: working professionals moving freight and keeping the economy running. But the FBI’s data is clear that a small subset has used the profession as a cover for serial predation.
What stopped this particular suspect was technology that did not exist when the Highway Serial Killings Initiative began.
Detectives used FLOCK license plate reader technology to identify the semi-truck, which was registered to a motor carrier based in Arizona. From there, investigators identified the driver and determined that he was a Mexican national working for the company as a long-haul operator.
An arrest warrant was issued on December 31, 2025. Six days later, the suspect was taken into custody when he attempted to enter the United States through an Arizona border crossing.
FLOCK cameras have become ubiquitous at truck stops, weigh stations, and along interstate corridors. Combined with electronic logging devices, GPS tracking, and in-cab cameras, now standard at many carriers, the surveillance infrastructure in place today makes it significantly harder for predatory drivers to operate undetected. This tech is reminiscent of the technology Genlogs is using to fight freight fraud and cargo theft.
Figliuzzi noted in his research that corporate trucking has become much more accountable due to this technology. The drivers who continue to pose risks are more likely to be operating for smaller carriers with less oversight, or owner-operators with minimal accountability.
The Ellensburg Police Department has not released information about the carrier involved in this case or the level of monitoring that was in place.
The suspect is being held pending extradition to Washington state, where he will face charges in Kittitas County. His name and the identity of his employer will likely become public record once formal charges are filed.
The Ellensburg Police Department is asking anyone with additional information to contact detectives at 509-962-7280.
For investigators working the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, cases like this one represent the front end of a pipeline they have been trying to shut down for two decades. Not every truck driver who exhibits predatory behavior becomes a serial killer. But every serial killer who used trucking as cover started somewhere.
The girls who ran and hid that night in Ellensburg may have prevented something much worse.
