A DNA match led investigators to Michael Pedry who was charged with stealing a truck in mid-June 2016. Pedry was in Baxter County Circuit Court last Thursday where he entered a guilty plea to charges against him related to the theft and was sentenced to five years in prison with two to serve and three suspended.
According to the probable cause affidavit, the pickup truck was taken from a local repair shop where it was parked.
The vehicle was located abandoned along a county road just south of Mountain Home. Mountain Home police went to the scene and found a blood smear on the seatbelt buckle on the driver’s side of the truck.
A sample of the blood was sent to the State Crime Laboratory in Little Rock. The lab reported a DNA match to Pedry. The owner of the truck said he did not know Pedry, and there would have been no reason for him to be in the man’s truck.
Pedry is currently an inmate in the North Central Unit of the state prison system at Calico Rock on an earlier conviction. Pedry has been involved in the theft of other trucks. In late 2016, he was sentenced to five years in prison after admitting he had stolen two pickup trucks.
At the time of the sentencing on the earlier cases, Pedry was asked why he had taken the trucks. He replied he “just wanted to drive them.”
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