YAKIMA, Wash. -- A former Selah man has been arrested and charged with the 2005 theft of 600 feet of copper wire that once powered the historic Yakima trolley through the Selah Gap.

David Lee Collman, 45, appeared Friday before Yakima County Superior Court Judge Ruth Reukauf, who set bail at $10,000 and assigned the public defender's office to the case.

The case dates to September 2005, when thieves climbed poles along the trolley tracks through the Selah Gap and cut down the thick overhead wire that had powered the trolley between Yakima and Selah for decades.

Although authorities later recovered the wire from a homeless camp in the area, the way the thieves had sectioned it off for easy transport made it useless. The trolley has never made the run to Selah again.

According to arrest records, Collman was one of two men identified by police as suspects within a week of the discovery of the theft.

Collman told a detective that he and his alleged accomplice had planned to sell the wire to a recycler in Tacoma. The other man, however, denied involvement and charges were eventually dismissed on evidentiary grounds.

It was not immediately clear how or why Collman only recently came to be in custody in the case. Court records indicate he was arrested last month in Klamath Falls, Ore., on a warrant.

The theft of the wire occurred during a particularly bad period for almost any kind of scrap metal that wasn't nailed down.

Months earlier, thieves twice had broken into a storage unit at the Yakima County Sheriff's Office and stole more than 1,000 feet of copper cable belonging to the sheriff's search-and-rescue team.

A year later, security guards caught a man in the act while he was cutting down a lengthy section of trolley wire from a tree by the Yakima Valley Trolleys yard in the 300 block of Pine Street.

The thief had climbed the tree with the aid of telephone pole climbing gear used by utility workers, police said. A second suspect got away after a high-speed chase.

Authorities later successfully prosecuted two different Lower Valley scrap metal dealers accused of fencing stolen property.

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 509-577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com.