On a cold night in January 2009, TriMet union president Jonathan Hunt found himself standing outside his Beaverton home, dressed in a bathrobe and arguing with a taxi driver.
"It was 2 a.m.," Hunt recalled. "The driver insisted that someone with my name had called for a ride to the airport. I told him it had to be a mistake."
A week later, the head of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757 began receiving multiple calls in the dead of night from an automated wake-up service.
That's when Hunt realized that the taxi and sleep-shattering phone calls weren't a mistake. The harassment, whose targets included outgoing General Manager Fred Hansen, was part of what Hunt and TriMet officials describe as the latest "terrorizing campaign" by a fired TriMet driver.
Hunt said James Lee Stenger has harassed him by posting Craigslist ads selling Hunt's things, signing him up for magazine subscriptions, having a dozen pizzas sent to his house and writing obscene restaurant reviews that mention him and Hansen.
TriMet said the agency suspects Stenger also is behind the cyber-harassment of a half dozen current and former employees, including a fake pornography site that claims to feature a female operations manager.
"We want this stopped," Hunt said.
The problem for law enforcement officials: Stenger, 57, is living in Thailand, out of easy reach of U.S. authorities.
While the FBI declined to confirm an investigation, officials said the case was a perfect example of how the Internet has made it easy for people to thumb their nose at U.S. authorities from halfway around the world.
"The obvious challenge is that he's not in the U.S.," said Beth Anne Steele, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Portland. "We would have to look at a way to go through legal authorities in Thailand."
What's more, Steele said, the alleged activity, while malicious, may not rise to a level where the FBI would dedicate resources to a criminal case.
E-mails to Stenger's YouTube account, where he has posted a six-minute anti-TriMet manifesto set to heavy-metal music, have not been returned.
In November 2004, Stenger, who once lived in Beaverton, was off-duty but wearing his TriMet uniform when he made racial comments to a Hawaiian restaurant employee at the Kauai Island Grill on Northwest Murray Road. He pushed an employee and kicked in a door at the business when he had trouble changing his order.
TriMet officials investigated his behavior and ended his 11-year employment a month later. Stenger went through the grievance process, Hunt said, but the union membership voted against supporting him. Stenger pleaded guilty in 2005 to harassment and was sentenced to probation.
The relatively recent events aren't the first time Stenger has been accused of harassing TriMet officials.
In June 2006, TriMet police warned the public that they were looking for Stenger, saying he was sending threatening e-mails to the transit agency from Thailand.
A little more than a year ago, Hunt said, Stenger started e-mailing him, requesting that TriMet change his termination to a resignation. "He wanted to come back to the States and look for work again," Hunt said.
Hunt said he has repeatedly had to answer questions from union and city officials from around the Northwest who have read the offensive postings credited to him.
"Unfortunately," Hunt said, "Jim Stenger is getting higher ratings on Google than any of the good work we're doing."
March, 2010 Monthly News Archives | Hard Drive - OregonLive.com
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yes you can go too far-