Pierce Co. sheriff's detective has run-in with creepy clown

Even a sheriff’s detective in Pierce County is spooked by the creepy clown craze.

Creepy, scary clowns have shown up in locales across America. Locally, schools have shut down due to clown-related incidents — many having to do with online messages. Some have risen to the level of threats.

Det. Ed Troyer tells KIRO Radio’s Ron and Don that Pierce County sheriff officials have decided to stop responding to creepy clown calls, which are generally the result of pranks.

“What we’ve got going on is a thing called the Watertown Clowns out of New York, and they are also the clown cult,” Troyer said. “What they’ve been doing is trolling the internet, finding these stories across the country, and they are sending out tweets and Facebook messages with scary clown faces. They are not making threats, but they are naming the schools and naming the kids and saying, ‘Look for me,’ ‘I’m coming for you tomorrow,’ ‘I want to make friends with you.'”

“That’s where this is coming from, all the internet things,” he said. “Turns out it’s coming out of New York. It’s not real, that’s why we are not responding to them anymore. Now if there is clown on school grounds, armed with a knife or weapon on the side of the road, disrupting traffic, trespassing or any other crime, or if they are perceived as a threat, we will work it and they can go to jail.”

Troyer meets a creepy clown

But while Troyer was at dinner Wednesday night, he encountered a creepy clown himself in Tacoma. It was staring him down through the restaurant window. He continued to stare even after moving to the bus stop.

“It’s interesting, we were sitting there talking about all the clown things going on and how we weren’t going to respond to them anymore,” Troyer said. “And up comes this scary-looking clown staring at us in the window, holding some balloons. I thought it was a joke and it turned out not to be anybody I knew. He went around the area looking into windows.”

Troyer’s initial reaction was to go outside and talk to the guy, but he figured it was best not to fuel the clown with attention.

“Until he looked into the window of a restaurant and there was a little girl with her head down and arms over it — scared the hell out of her,” Troyer said. “At that point I think he knew I was coming out and he was gone.”

Troyer said that the creepy clown craze can be dangerous because cops may respond to incidents just like they would with a person wearing a ski mask.

For now, his detectives have looked into the phenomenon. He said it is tied to some level of organization.

“I think it’s being done intentionally to more than just scare people … I hope we don’t have a whole month of this, but I feel that we are,” he said. “I understand the joke and everything, and being a creepy clown. But unfortunately, we had some things happen down here that brought it to a whole other level. We have people in jail who pretended to be clowns and shut schools down.”

Listen to Troyer’s full interview below.

MyNorthwest