When a botched home invasion leads law enforcement to pursue two dangerous men into the Idaho wilderness, the fallout is fatal for the one forest service officer who dared to face the fugitives head-on.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-tracker Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck
Chapter 1: What crime happened in Bonner County, Idaho?
Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today doesn't technically take place within the bounds of a national or state park. But if you were to look at it from a bird's eye view, it's the closest thing to it. I'm talking about Bonner County, Idaho, which sits extremely close to the US-Canada border.
There's an abundance of animals in this region, including birds of prey, pheasants, and swans. Some rather frightening species of wildlife that roam this terrain include coyotes, mountain lions, black bears, and even grizzly bears. But on a cold January day in 1989, it wasn't apex predators that residents were worried about.
It was two armed men, on the loose in the forest, who were responsible for an act of bloodshed that marked one of the most notorious crimes in northern Idaho's history. The devastating impact their actions had on families from this area is as real today as it was 36 years ago.
so
Around 6.30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 11th, 1989, a woman named Tammy Polonick was relaxing with her family inside her mother's house near the small town of Sagal, Idaho. In total, there were nine people in the home. Tammy, who was pregnant, her husband Mark, her brother, her brother's wife, and a few teenagers and kids.
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Chapter 2: Who were the victims during the home invasion?
Because the house was large and had several stories, it was the perfect place for the group to vacation together while simultaneously acting as house sitters for Tammy's mother, Lee, who happened to be out of town in California.
As everyone was settling in for the evening, most of the kids stayed on the entry-level floor of the home, which had some bedrooms and I think the living room, while Tammy and the other adults hung out on the lower level. Sometime shortly after 6.30 p.m., though, she and her husband Mark heard a noticeable thud come from upstairs.
So they decided to check things out, and I imagine just make sure the kids were okay. But when Mark rounded the corner at the top of the staircase that led to the upper level, a man wearing all black confronted him and struck him in the head with the butt of a gun, then said, quote, hey dude, this is for real, end quote.
Right after hitting Mark, the masked man forced the adults upstairs and it became clear to everyone that there was another assailant in the house helping to corral the family members into the living room. The victims were all directed to lay down on their stomachs and then bound with duct tape to ensure they couldn't escape or fight back.
While all of that was going on, the two suspects repeatedly threatened to kill the victims and demanded to know where the home safe was located. Tammy desperately tried to explain to the attackers that there was no safe in her mom's house, but the masked men didn't believe her.
She later told producers for Oxygen's episode of Killer Siblings titled Pratt that at one point in time, her mom had kept a safe on the premises because she'd operated a business and usually stored some funds at home, but that was no longer the case. So for several hours, the suspects just went round and round, making threats and demands and essentially terrorizing Tammy and her family.
The intruders gathered a gun from the home and a small amount of cash, but they seemingly didn't want any jewelry or other valuables. Eventually, around 9.30 p.m., one of Tammy's nieces was able to crawl out of the living room undetected and dialed 911. The nearest law enforcement agency that first received that call was the city of Sandpoint Police Department.
Sandpoint seems to be the nearest larger city to where Tammy and her family were staying, which makes sense why the call was routed to them. And shortly after learning about the burglary in progress, Sandpoint PD looped in the Bonner County Sheriff's Office, who also sent deputies to the scene.
When units arrived, they could see that lights were on inside Tammy's mom's house and people were moving around. So a few members of law enforcement walked around the back of the structure to get a better look, but within minutes of doing that, they heard gunshots go off inside.
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Chapter 3: What actions did law enforcement take during the hostage situation?
Then they turned their attention to finding the suspects who'd taken off into the woods. But just as they were doing that, the young man who'd been taken hostage materialized from the tree line and sprinted across the home's lawn to join his girlfriend's family. He told authorities that the two men who'd taken him at gunpoint had decided at the last minute to let him go.
He described how his captors had dragged him through the trees and across a nearby roadway called Lignite Road. Then they'd made a beeline to a gold-colored vehicle before one of them abruptly ordered the other to release him. After that, the teenager said the masked man got into their car and took off, headed south.
Now, at that point, other members of law enforcement had become aware of the unfolding situation and were on alert. By sheer coincidence, a detective for Bonner County, who was just a few miles away from the crime scene, saw a gold Chevrolet Monte Carlo speed past him, headed in the opposite direction.
This detective had heard the description of the alleged suspect's vehicle come over his radio and surmised that the drivers of the gold car that had just passed him were likely involved in the home invasion. so he whipped his cruiser around and started pursuing the Monte Carlo.
He chased the vehicle north in the direction of the city of Sandpoint, and waiting to intercept the car there was a group of city police officers. But the driver of the Monte Carlo avoided that roadblock and took a hard left on a roadway called Lakeshore Drive, which happened to be slick and covered with snow at the time.
Despite treacherous conditions for a car chase, the detective who was pursuing the gold car didn't fall back. Well, that is until someone sitting in the passenger seat of the Chevy leaned out and shot several times into the detective's windshield. That was the point when the detective figured enough was enough, and he pulled back.
The gold car then sped out of sight, and thankfully the detective wasn't injured, but his front windshield was toast. From that point, it was up to his colleagues to find the gold car and its occupants. Around 10 p.m., even more officers and deputies got involved in the manhunt, and teams eventually found the suspect's vehicle wrecked into a snowbank.
It was on the left-hand side of the roadway it was last seen on. No one was inside, but several rounds of ammunition, magazines, and firearms were in the trunk. The caliber of the abandoned ammo indicated that the suspects were armed with pistols and at least one shotgun. In the snow, trailing away from the car were shoe prints that led investigators over a snowbank and further into the woods.
Before setting off to follow the prints, the sheriff's office looked up the Monte Carlo's license plate information and discovered that it was registered to a local resident named Joseph Pratt. Some deputies who worked for the sheriff's office at the time recognized Joseph's name because he'd been living in Sandpoint.
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Chapter 4: How did the suspects escape after the incident?
By 5 o'clock, authorities had cornered the two suspects in a small stretch of woods near a street named Smith Creek Road. The spot was about eight miles west of the city of Sandpoint. The location was uniquely isolated, so there was nowhere for the Pratt brothers to run.
Around 5.15 p.m., Brent and a 24-year-old Bonner County deputy accompanying him named Steve Barbieri walked towards the general area they believed the suspects were hiding, but were suddenly attacked with a volley of gunfire as they entered a heavily wooded ravine.
The moment was chaotic and visibility was poor, not to mention there was little to no radio reception between officers because of how remote the terrain was. So it was hard to tell who was where or where the shots were even coming from.
As soon as the gunfire stopped, though, another sheriff's deputy on Brent's team who was further back heard what he thought sounded like a person gasping for air or moaning. Basically, it's what he described as someone's dying breaths. Then Brent's partner, Steve Barbieri, emerged from the woods and told the rest of the team that Brent had been shot.
Steve explained how he and Brent had unknowingly gotten fairly close to the Pratt brothers who were dressed in black and hiding below a pine tree. They'd ordered the suspects to show their hands, but the men didn't. Instead, the brothers blasted the officers and Brent had gone down almost immediately.
Steve said he'd been able to fire off a few rounds from his shotgun at some point while diving for cover, and then switch to a handgun, but that gun had jammed, making it impossible for him to continue to return fire. He said that in the scurry, he and Brent had gotten separated, and eventually he had to retreat to avoid getting shot too.
So by 5.20 p.m., it was clear to everyone involved in the manhunt that Brent was down somewhere in the forest and needed medical attention. But authorities had to use caution because it wasn't clear right away whether the two suspects were still in the area.
Eventually, though, Brent's colleagues determined that the Prats had fled, and so they had to make the tough decision to try and find them before going to check on Brent. About 40 minutes after this, authorities got a call from a man named Max Singleton, who lived at a house near the shooting scene.
And Max, who was home with his two sons at the time, told investigators that Joseph and James Pratt were at his place and wanted to surrender. Not long after that, a crisis response team arrived and by 6.50 p.m., the Pratts were taken into custody without further incident. Finally, everyone could breathe a sigh of relief because the nearly 22-hour manhunt was over.
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Chapter 5: Who was Brent Jacobson and what role did he play?
Their father and mother divorced when they were kids, and after that, the brothers moved frequently with their dad. Of the two of them, James was reportedly the more confident brother who was physically taller and I think just viewed as the leader of the pair. More than a decade before this crime, their dad had moved them to Idaho to mine gold and silver with the goal of getting rich.
But that endeavor fizzled out with poor results after about five years. And when the brothers were in their late teens and early 20s, their father decided to leave Idaho entirely, but James and Joseph continued living there. They found work at a cedar mill, and Joseph even ended up getting married and starting a family of his own.
By the time the year 1980 rolled around, though, both men had fallen on hard times financially. During that time, they struck up a friendship with a woman named Gloria White, who owned a large cabin in the Katka Mountain area of Idaho, which is about an hour and a half northeast of Sandpoint.
Gloria had a tendency to befriend and shelter folks who had criminal pasts or who needed to catch a break in life. The Pratt brothers fit the latter description, so at one point they'd ask Gloria for a loan. But instead of providing them with cash, she introduced them to another guy who was staying at her house named Jim. Jim, as it turns out, though, was not that guy's real name.
His true identity was Christopher Boyce, who was, wait for it, the son of an FBI agent who was a convicted spy on the run from federal authorities. I know, this part of the story is wild, like I said. In 1977, Christopher was convicted of espionage for selling satellite technology secrets from the CIA to the Soviet Union.
For that crime, he was sentenced to 40 years in a California federal prison, but escaped about three years later in 1980. During his short time behind bars, though, Christopher had picked up a few tips from other inmates on how to successfully rob banks. So when he escaped, he went straight to committing that kind of crime.
Along the way, he met and enlisted James and Joseph and one of their other brothers named Kendall Pratt to help him rob about six banks in Idaho, Washington, and Montana. According to news coverage and court documents, the Pratts usually acted as Christopher's getaway driver.
By 1981, though, the men's arrangement had soured because James had started to suspect that Christopher wasn't giving him and his brothers their fair share of the spoils from the bank robbery jobs. So infighting within the group resulted in a fallout between the Pratts and Christopher, one that would eventually come back to bite Christopher big time.
In the summer of 1981, fresh off the brother split with Christopher, James was reading some newspaper articles and learned that the US Marshals were offering a $15,000 reward for Christopher's capture. James and Joseph used that information to their advantage and became paid government informants, eventually leading investigators to Christopher.
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Chapter 6: What happened during the shootout with the suspects?
Though the source material doesn't explicitly state this, I also think another reason why these bigger agencies were requested to be involved was to help the Bonner County Sheriff's Department review their agency's actions and everything that had transpired during the manhunt.
You see, in the aftermath of the chase, Brent's death, and the Pratt brothers' eventual arrests, Bonner County Sheriff admitted that the situation could have been handled better in terms of planning and execution.
The Associated Press reported that the sheriff said the incident was all around a very difficult response to coordinate because of the terrain it took place in, but he agreed law enforcement's actions and tactics should be critiqued, at least as a learning moment.
For example, the agency wanted to examine every aspect of Deputy Steve Barbieri's response since he was the only other law enforcement officer who'd physically been with Brent when the shootout happened. Through a series of experiments, the sheriff's office tried to figure out why Steve's handgun had allegedly jammed when he said he'd tried to fire it at the Pratts.
Did the cold weather have something to do with it? Was it Steve panicking? Was the firearm just defective? The best conclusion the department could come to was that the gun had not malfunctioned due to the cold, but rather Steve, who was wearing very thick gloves during the shootout, had accidentally gripped the trigger guard of the handgun instead of actually pulling the trigger.
There was also a question of how many shots had been fired between the Pratts and law enforcement. Some personnel who were stationed near the crime scene and were assisting Steve and Brent said they heard what they described as a volley of gunshots exchanged in the woods. Upwards of 20 rounds, actually.
Now, that was an interesting detail because it indicated that the shootout had spanned for perhaps longer than initially estimated, or at least involved a lot more firepower than what struck Brent. One of Bonner County's sheriff's deputies later stated in court that it almost sounded like the first couple shots were slower than the latter ones.
However, towards the end, the blast got so fast, he didn't think whoever was firing was a member of law enforcement because it just didn't seem like the kind of firing cadence an officer or deputy would do.
Reading between the lines, I think maybe firing in such quick succession like that could be considered or perceived as careless, which typically trained law enforcement officers try not to do in situations like this.
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Chapter 7: How did the story of the Pratt brothers unfold?
Another defense lawyer who'd represented Gloria White, that woman who was convicted for aiding Christopher, told the spokesman review that during her trial, he tried to convince jurors that the Pratts couldn't be trusted and were what the lawyer described as vicious people who should have never been given immunity from prosecution back in the early 1980s.
But we know that federal authorities didn't really take that sentiment to heart back in the day, which is why the Pratts were roaming free when they carried out their crime spree in 1989.
Kelly McBride reported for the Spokesman Review that James and Joseph claimed that law enforcement officers who chased them after the home invasion in Sagal were well aware of their former association with Christopher Boyce.
The duo claimed that police and the sheriff's deputies in the home invasion incident were motivated to catch them, dead or alive, simply because some members of Idaho law enforcement had held a grudge that both of them skirted punishment for their roles in the bank robbery cases. Joseph told McBride, quote, End quote.
In that same jailhouse interview, James told the newspaper that neither he nor his brother expected a bunch of people to be at Lee Turner's house on January 12th, 1989, especially kids. He claimed that the moment they realized children were inside, they considered bailing on the robbery because they didn't want it to turn into a hostage situation.
But one thing led to another and things just escalated from there. James also explained that it was never his or his brother's intention to injure or kill the first deputy who'd pursued them at the start of the car chase.
He said he'd tried to aim for the radiator of that deputy's car just to disable the vehicle so he'd stop pursuing them, but instead he'd shot higher than he intended to and the blast pierced through the deputy's windshield. He claimed that the entire time he and Joseph were on the run, they genuinely were afraid that if they stopped fleeing, members of law enforcement would kill them.
Eventually, after nearly a day of being pursued, they got so tired they had to stop to sleep. James said that's when Brent Jacobson and Steve Barbieri found them. James claimed it was one of the lawmen who'd shot first, not him or his brother. And it was a bullet from that first volley that had wounded him in the leg.
As a reaction to that shot, he'd fired back, but he said he had no idea he'd actually fatally wounded Brent. James admitted that he'd been armed with the caliber shotgun that killed Brett, but it was never his intention to do so. Regarding the pair's time on the run in the unforgiving woods, James told the newspaper that the longer the manhunt dragged on, the more he thought about dying.
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Chapter 8: What was the aftermath of Brent Jacobson's death?
And she even heaped on some additional charges. According to an article in the Coeur d'Alene Press, the brothers now faced first-degree burglary, 10 counts of aggravated assault, robbery, second-degree kidnapping, aggravated battery, aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, two counts of attempted first-degree murder, and first-degree murder.
bringing their charges to a grand total of 18 felonies each. So yeah, a lot, a lot. At their arraignment on February 7, 1989, James and Joseph both entered not guilty pleas, and their trial was scheduled for early May 1989. It was expected to last four weeks and cost Bonner County close to $250,000.
A few weeks into things, though, the men's cases were severed, with James' trial scheduled for May and Joseph's pushed to June.
Something else interesting was that James's court-appointed attorney, the same one who'd been jailed previously for contempt, got into another spat of sorts with the court when he filed a motion to have a new judge who'd been appointed to the case disqualified from overseeing the trial. One judge prior to that judge had already been disqualified per request from Joseph's attorney, Bruce Green.
So to say things between the defense, the prosecution, and the court itself were growing tense is a bit of an understatement. But the defense's whole strategy in doing this was to keep the brothers' trials separate. The state wanted the cases consolidated, but the defendants didn't. The defense attorneys wanted James and Joseph to each have their own day in court with their own judge and jury.
And that's exactly what ended up being granted for the time being.
In another unprecedented twist, James and his attorney requested that he be allowed to visit the location in the woods where Brent Jacobson died because he wanted to be, quote, chained or otherwise secured to a tree or other appropriate fixed object within the shooting site, and all law enforcement officers at the shooting site shall withdraw beyond hearing distance from the location where defendant is so secured, in order that defendant may privately confer with his attorney and the attorney's assistance at said location.
But even as wild as that request was, the judge and prosecution ended up agreeing to it. Also at that point, it was decided that the trials would be moved to Kootenai County, Idaho, because Bonner County had become too saturated with information about the case to produce an impartial jury.
Between April and May 1989, several additional motions were filed and argued in court, which resulted in Joseph and James' cases being unsevered, meaning they would proceed to trial at the same time with the same jury and judge. And the attempted murder charge for the brothers' attack on Mark Palahniuk also got dismissed.
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