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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Ebel breaks silence on tasing

Justin Ebel, park officials offer sharply divergent versions of water-based incident

David Colburn
Posted 2/8/23

REGIONAL- The details of a controversial incident last summer during which an Ash River business owner was tased twice by law enforcement officials at Voyageurs National Park have come into clearer …

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Ebel breaks silence on tasing

Justin Ebel, park officials offer sharply divergent versions of water-based incident

Posted

REGIONAL- The details of a controversial incident last summer during which an Ash River business owner was tased twice by law enforcement officials at Voyageurs National Park have come into clearer focus as a result of a Timberjay investigation. That investigation includes an extended interview with Justin Ebel, owner of Ebel Voyageurs Houseboats, who broke seven months of attorney-advised silence to speak to the Timberjay about the incident this week.
The Timberjay has also obtained probable cause statements created by law enforcement officials as the basis for their actions and five citations that they issued against Ebel after the encounter on Lake Kabetogama.
Saturday, June 25 was a windy one on Kabetogama, with gusts reaching 25-30 mph, Ebel recalls. Record flood levels in the Rainy River basin were declining, and the receding waters meant rocks that had been deeply submerged were becoming potential hazards for boaters. Ebel said he and other lake recreation business owners had contacted Voyageurs National Park about two weeks prior requesting that efforts be stepped up to place markers for these emerging hazards.
Early that afternoon, calls began coming into the Ebel’s Voyageurs Houseboats office that one of their houseboats had run aground on a rock near the Ash River Visitor Center. According to the probable cause statements written by a Ranger Steve Pederson, one of two VNP enforcement rangers involved in the incident that day, the boat had driven on the wrong side of a navigational buoy and had become stuck. Ebel quickly went out in his 26-foot service boat to help.
When Ebel arrived at the scene, he worked to position his boat so he could secure lines to pull the houseboat off the rocks.
“It was very windy, so much that it was real tough to keep my boat up near the houseboat while it was grounded,” Ebel said. “I couldn’t physically get off my boat and hop around there.”
He said he noticed two park rangers in a boat near a maintenance area at the visitor center “where law enforcement would park their boats.”
“They got close enough to watch what I was doing, so they know I’m pulling it off the rocks,” Ebel said. “At this time, I’m in the middle of taking care of my business.”
Pulling houseboats out of sticky situations is something Ebel is accustomed to after 22 years of working the lake, and once the boat was freed he informed the couple on board of his plan to get the boat to safe harbor. With Ebel in the lead, they would motor out into the channel and travel through the nearby narrows to the calmer waters of Sullivan Bay, where the houseboat could be parked and thoroughly checked for possible damage.
“They were an older couple, and they were very scared, but they followed me,” he said. “I tried to make them comfortable.”
Just before they entered the narrows, Ebel said, the park rangers’ boat approached him from an angle and he said he could tell they wanted to talk. As the houseboat kept proceeding, Ebel talked with the rangers.
“They basically said thanks for pulling the boat off,” he said. “I might have said I’ve had three of them today, then I just kind of proceeded to go on. They motored back up to me and asked if my guests’ trip was over, and I said no, they’re due in tomorrow. I said I had plans of getting them to Sullivan Bay, and that’s all I basically said to them. And I kept proceeding and doing what I was doing.”
Ebel said it appeared the rangers were leaving the scene as he circled around to retrieve a 14-foot boat that had come untied from the houseboat, and once that was secured he moved back into the lead to guide the houseboat through the narrows. But after entering the mouth of the narrows a few hundred feet, he turned around and saw that the rangers hadn’t left.
“I look back and realized that the park rangers must have pulled up next to the houseboat and must have told them to go back out into the open in the middle of the lake,” Ebel said. “I radioed my boat and said what’s going on guys. They were struggling to turn around and I asked them what they were doing. And they said well, law enforcement says they need to board the boat and that they wanted us to turn around and go all the way out into the middle of the lake. My response to that was that’s a bunch of BS. You’re gonna have to turn the boat around. We’ll get it to Sullivan Bay, we’ll park the boat, and they can do whatever they want. The guest again over the radio said okay, that sounds like a decision. You’ve got to remember they were scared. I’m concerned about my guests’ safety, about the seaworthiness of my boat, and now they’re telling them to turn around when I wasn’t done taking care of my equipment.”
Ebel said he turned around and idled his way back to the rangers in the middle of the lake.
“The houseboat was clearly now heading back toward Sullivan Bay and the park rangers just waited out there,” Ebel said. “If their big concern was to get on that boat that they wanted to board, why were they worried about me? Why didn’t they go back to the houseboat? I’m assuming they heard me over the radio through their scanner.”
The accounts of what transpired when Ebel approached the rangers’ boat differ in multiple respects.
“I’ve met up with a ranger out on the lake and I had said to him, ‘What’s the deal, guys? I gotta get this boat parked. I want to get this boat into Sullivan Bay, what’s the deal?’ And I got met with one park ranger standing up, pointing his finger at me and yelling three sentences: ‘This is none of your business. Your job is done here. Now leave.’ After he yelled at me that it wasn’t my business I turned and told him, I said, ‘This is my f**king business. I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to park the houseboat in Sullivan Bay, get them tied up out of the wind, and then you can do whatever you want. You can board the houseboat.’ So, at that time, I just started driving away, idling.”
Pedersen’s statement paints a different picture.
“We had instructed a houseboat to follow us into the main part of the channel because of the wind,” he wrote. “The houseboat operator started following us toward the center of the channel, then stopped. I observed who I recognized and later confirmed as Justin Ebel the houseboat company owner approach our location. Ebel began to yell and swear at us and tell us we cannot board his houseboat. Ebel yelled something close to, ‘we are going to have a real problem if you talk to them.’ The tone of Ebel’s yelling was loud, forceful and aggravated. Ebel moved his body/arms in quick rigid movements pointing his finger.”
Ebel’s and Pederson’s versions concur at least in part on what happened as Ebel continued idling away.
“They kind of pull up and the start basically saying pull the boat over, shut the engines down. I just said no, I’m going to take care of my boat.”
Ebel provided the Timberjay with a 20-second cell phone video he took containing his comments to the rangers as they drove alongside him ordering him to stop. His tone appeared to be one of frustration and urgency.
“I will not shut the motor down because I’m helping one of my guests park a boat,” he told the rangers. “Once we park the boat out of the wind then we can deal with this. I don’t care who you are. I don’t even care. You can do what you want, whatever, but I’m not stopping until I get my guests taken care of. This is ridiculous.”
Ebel said that the video cut off when he received a call from his wife.
Pederson’s statement also described Ebel’s noncompliance with the orders.
“I told Ebel multiple times to stop his vessel. Multiple times Ebel said no. Ebel never stopped his vessel. I had to jump from my vessel to his and shut off his motors while both vessels were moving.”
Ebel said he had been communicating with his wife by phone and that she had tried to reach Park Superintendent Bob DeGross to ask him to intervene. When she was unsuccessful, Ebel said she contacted a long-term ranger they knew well, Kevin Grossheim.
“Somebody that’s been a veteran here for 20 years or better, the guy that we work with,” Ebel said. “These other guys, I don’t know them from the paint on the wall.”
Boarding and confrontation
In another probable cause statement, Pederson described boarding the boat and the ensuing confrontation with Ebel in the cabin of his service boat.
“I told Ebel he was being seized and to stop,” Pederson wrote. “I jumped onto his vessel and shut off the engines. I grabbed Ebel’s arm to control him, and he freed his arm. Body camera footage appears to show he struck me near my midsection. I gave Ebel commands to get out and to get down. I applied a pressure point to attempt to get pain compliance. Ebel continued to wrestle me. I wrestled Ebel to the ground and ordered Ebel to give me his hands. He did not give me his hands and continued to fight me until Ranger [Ryan] Houghton deployed his Taser. After being Tased, Ebel gave me his hands to be handcuffed.”
Ebel gave his recollection of what happened.
“My boat has a large cab on it, so he had to come through the door,” Ebel said. “I put my arm out to deflect him coming in, like he lunged at me from the other boat. After that, I don’t know if I got slammed down on my seat, but it was a matter of seconds that I was on the ground. I got shot with the first cartridge from the Taser in my backside below my butt. When I went down I had spilled out the door against the gunnel of the boat.”
Ebel said he took the brunt of the fall on his face, which stunned him momentarily. He recalls feeling a knee digging into his leg “real hard.” His phone, which had fallen into the splash wall in front of the gunnel, started ringing, he said, and he reached for it.
“As soon as I reached to grab my phone, I got met with whoever was leaning on me and cuffing me, ‘He’s resisting arrest, hit him again.’ And then I got shot again with the second cartridge of the Taser. I was done after that. Your body becomes completely useless.”
Ebel said the strike to the midsection Pederson reported was something that he wasn’t aware of.
“The tackle came out of surprise,” he said. “My natural reaction was probably to put my arm up. I’m positive I didn’t wind up and swing.”
Ebel also said he didn’t remember hearing a warning before being shot with the Taser.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was windy, we were in a boat, it happened very quickly. But no, I don’t recall hearing anything.”
Ebel said the rangers yelled at him to get up.
“I couldn’t physically get up,” he said. “I had to tell them you need to drag me back to an open spot on the boat, so they dragged me by my feet back to the open spot. And I can’t get up. At this point I’m pissed. I’m using plenty of curse words at them because I don’t care. So then they sat me up on the bench.”
Still concerned about the houseboat that was motoring toward Sullivan Bay, Ebel said he convinced the rangers to let him call back to his base by radio, and he told his wife that he’d been arrested and that she needed to dispatch another employee to go assist the houseboat.
The rangers drove the boats back to the Ash River Visitor Center, where they were met by Ebel’s wife and Ranger Kevin, who removed the Taser prongs, Ebel said.
“That where I sat and waited and waited for them to decide where they were going to take me,” Ebel said. “I was told that I was probably going to a federal prison in Minneapolis and I’d be staying the weekend. I just sat on the picnic table.”
Ebel was actually taken to the jail in Bemidji in a park ranger truck with a holding cell in the back to be booked, with a stop at the hospital to be checked out. Ebel’s wife drove to Bemidji to take him home.
“I said I needed to get done as quick as possible to get booked into jail and it’s Saturday night and I need to go home because I’ve got a business to run,” Ebel said.
Meanwhile, attempts to rescue the houseboat and guests were successful, Ebel said.
“They were able to get to the houseboat and they brought it into the into the base and shored it up,” he said. “We didn’t have any problems. They were thinking on their feet there because I was not able to have any contact.”
For the sole offense Ebel plead no contest to failure to obey a lawful order of a government employee or agent, he was fined $200. He had to pay an additional $30  processing fee, and the processing fees were waived for the other four citations, which included the dismissed charges of disorderly conduct, interfering with a government employee, improper display of boat registration, and assaulting or resisting an officer.
In spite of the plea, Ebel still believes that what he did was in the best interests of his customers’ safety and disagrees with the actions of the rangers.
“Those are my customers,” he said. I hold the liability for my customers and for the seaworthiness of my equipment. I can’t stress enough that this boat needed to be in safe harbor, and they weren’t willing to facilitate that. I wasn’t denying them access to the boat. I told them we needed to do this first and I was taking care of it. For them to say that I was telling them that they can’t go on the boat, I can’t even believe it.”
Ebel also said that his commercial use authorization for the park was restricted about two weeks following the incident.
“That allows me to function in the park with my service boat, doing services, fixing equipment, pulling stuff of rocks, and whatnot, and this got suspended in the middle of all of this,” he said. “We asked and they gave us a two-week extension that got us to maybe the end of July, and then I had to hire another CUA operator to take on my workload. The conditions were that I can’t do regular maintenance and I couldn’t haul regular supplies or goods. I could do emergency only for rock pulls or something that required pulling of a houseboat. I had to call into I think it was a national dispatch in Ohio and tell them what I was doing and they would relay it to Voyageurs. I was extremely limited to what I could do on the lake because of the suspension.”
Ebel said he’s working on this year’s application now.
“They tell me that I’m going to get it back, however it will be on probation for one year,” he said.
Ebel noted that his incident occurred at a time when park-oriented businesses were raising concerns about increased law enforcement in the park and its effect on their guests. He referenced the four public meetings held by park officials to receive input about the issue.
“I was shocked to find out that there were so many other conflicts going on with law enforcement over probably just petty things or random boat checks,” he said. “I guess I can understand the concerns of the communities after my incident. I don’t understand. I never saw it going that way. I’ve played it over a million times, and I could never see it going that way.”

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Park Service has still failed to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for the probable cause statements from this incident. The Timberjay was recently able to obtain the documents from another governmental entity, the Central Violations Bureau. This story has been updated from the print version to reflect information provided by Heather Ebel, Justin's wife, that was not available in the PACER court records the Timberjay consulted regarding Ebel's no contest plea and the processing fees that were assessed.