A Seattle man was arrested for allegedly using a stolen excavator to tear down part of a public park while claiming to have permission to build himself a cabin.
Steven Irwin, 41, was busted after multiple 911 calls about destruction at Dr. Jose Rizal Park on Saturday afternoon, the Seattle Police Department confirmed to The Post.
“I just happen to come across him as I was coming home,” park steward Genevieve Courtney told Fox 13 of seeing the huge machinery zipping along the sidewalk.
“He was driving a little crazy with this heavy piece of machinery,” she said.
Courtney said she eventually called 911 six times, and “didn’t feel like they were taking me seriously.”
“They were like, ‘Does he have a weapon?’ I am like, ‘Yes, he has a backhoe. That’s a weapon,'” she told Fox 13.
“It’s scary seeing someone with a big excavator going through the park, and it could have been a lot worse of a situation,” she told KOMO,
When police did respond, they found Irwin still inside the machinery, which is thought to have been stolen from a nearby construction site, the reports said.
He was filmed being led by police out of a ditch and arrested.
“He was compliant,” Andrea Suarez of community clean-up group “We Heart Seattle” told Fox 13. “But he did tell police he had permission to be here and set up camp.”
Irwin was charged with theft of a motor vehicle and was booked into King County Jail, Seattle police confirmed to The Post.
Photos from the aftermath show downed trees and tire tracks in the dirt.
Park Steward Craig Thompson complained that it undid “hundreds of hours of volunteer work” that had helped spruce up the area.
“What we have seen here today is one person who decided to undo all of that work for the sake of whatever reason he had in his irrational mind,” Thompson said.
Suarez, the “We Heart Seattle” executive director, also said the situation should serve as a wake-up call to local leaders in the crime-ridden city.
“For somebody to have the nerve to take a piece of equipment of this value and destroy our urban forest makes you question everything,” she said.
“Why are we here in the first place? Why has Seattle become a no-rules playground?”
She added in a Facebook post that the repairs to the park will likely take decades, and claimed that propane tanks, chainsaws, five pounds of weed, methamphetamines and a dozen stolen credit cards were recovered from his makeshift encampment.
“It’s important to point out that it took several police calls and a long response time for our police department to arrive because other priorities, including two shootings in South Seattle, had tied them up,” Suarez wrote, noting that the city is down 700 officers since 2019.
“We need to elect a city council who politically and financially supports funding a fully staffed agency,” she urged.