Federal charges sought in radio interference case

Local authorities will seek federal charges against a Fisk man they allege has been interfering with the Butler County Sheriff’s Department’s ability to send radio transmissions.

Larry Keith McKuin, 57, was arrested earlier in the week on suspicion of tampering with judicial proceedings. He was booked at the Butler County jail Wednesday and later released.

On Friday, Butler County Chief Deputy Wes Popp said, he spoke with Federal Communications Commission officials in Chicago, Ill., who want to pursue the case federally.

“We’ve been having problems with our radios” for about six months, explained Popp. “For some reason, we would get Medic One, both transmitting and receiving (over the department’s frequency).

“We would get others, but that was the most frequent.”

The interruptions, Popp said, were sporadic and would go for two or three minutes and then stop.

“It wouldn’t happen all the time, just once in a while,” he said. “Then, in the last week and a half, we were getting a high squealing noise that would stay on continuous.

“That would cut off our communication. The guys wouldn’t be able to transmit and neither would dispatch.”

Everything was “disrupted,” Popp explained. “Every time he done that, we had to switch to a different channel to be able to communicate.”

If an emergency call was put out, and “we’re not transmitting on our own frequency,” other agencies couldn’t hear the transmission, Popp said.

Sometimes, depending on the location of the calls, a trooper with the Missouri State Highway Patrol or an officer with the Poplar Bluff Police Department might be closer and can respond, Popp said.

“Thank God, it didn’t happen, but it could have happened,” Popp said.

When the interference did occur, Popp said, it didn’t effect the entire county every time depending on the atmospheric pressure.

Some days, he said, the disruptions only were on the east side of the county and transmissions were fine in the other side of the county.

“We’ve been looking at our system to try to figure out where this was coming from,” Popp explained. “It was determined it was coming from an outside source.”

That is when officers began looking for that source, said Popp, who indicated a member of the Poplar Bluff Severe Weather Response Team got information the interference was “being done purposefully at a house down here on Ash Hill.”

On Wednesday evening, Popp said, deputies went to a home in the 2000 block of Highway 51 for a “knock and talk.” The home reportedly is located on the south side of Highway B.

Contact was made with the homeowners, and “as they were talking, (the deputy) could visibly see the equipment on the floor with the same noise that was being transmitted over our frequency,” said Popp, who indicated the garage door was open and the equipment was “just inside” the door.

A search warrant, he said, subsequently was obtained for the home.

The seized equipment, Popp said, included what he described as “an old one com portable radio, two scanners and a noise analyzer,” as well as an outside antenna.

The noise analyzer was “plugged in, turned all the way up, creating that noise we were getting over the radio,” Popp said.

An elastic hair tie was being used to hold down the talk button on the radio, so it was “continuously holding down the talk” button and constantly transmitting.

“The radio was somehow programmed to our frequency,” Popp said.

McKuin was arrested and interviewed.

“He denied what he was doing,” Popp said. “He says he was trying to locate the interference on his TV that he believed was caused by the railroad.”