It’s unclear exactly what happened up a long driveway off County Road 110 north of Silverton last month.

But what is known for certain is that on Jan. 20, Justin Swartz and Craig Miller moved a snowcat parked on the property of the Aerie Lodge, which is under construction.

The co-owner of the lodge, Nick Croce, was in New York but was alerted to the movement by a video doorbell camera. Croce looked and saw that the $140,000 vehicle was not in the parking space where he had left it. So he called authorities and reported the vehicle stolen.

The snowcat was found about an hour later, still on the property, where Swartz and Miller left it.

Members of the public identified Swartz and Miller from a video recording based on their voices, and San Juan County Sheriff’s Deputy Abigail Armistead contacted the two in the course of her investigation.

On Jan. 31, 6th Judicial District Court Judge Anthony Edwards signed arrest warrants for Swartz and Miller on suspicion of attempted fourth-degree felony theft.

The two turned themselves in the following evening and were released on a personal recognizance bond.

But the details of the event contained in Armistead’s arrest affidavit differ vastly from Swartz’s version of events.

To complicate matters, Swartz is a candidate for mayor in the April 2 election. The town’s fraught mayoral contests have been held up on the national stage as a microcosm of the nation’s political division.

And Swartz is now leveling accusations that The Silverton Standard & the Miner, which reported on the case using the arrest affidavit, is trying to sway the results of the election.

The property in question sits approximately 4 miles north of Silverton along County Road 110, which leads to the Silverton Mountain ski area. Its owners are in the process of building a large, multi-season lodge.

In an interview with The Durango Herald, Swartz said the original contractor was no longer on the job and he had planned to take over construction.

“I have the prints for this entire job here at my house,” he said. “I was told I would have this job. They told me to go take a look at it, (so) I went and took a look at it.”

He said it took him and Miller, the construction foreman at Swartz’s company, over an hour to trudge up the 300-yard driveway through 2½ feet of snow. When they got to the site, they found the snowcat with the keys inside.

“We were told we had access to the snowcat, which I have in writing,” he said. “We used it to clear … part of the driveway on the way down.”

Rather than leave the snowcat at the top of the driveway and have to brave the driveway on foot again several days later, Swartz said he parked it lower down, next to another piece of equipment. He declined to provide a copy of the written authorization to use the vehicle or identify who had authorized the use.

According to the arrest affidavit, the two men are heard on video and one remarked that the plow blade will “cover their tracks.”

Swartz can be heard saying “Oh yeah, we’re clearing that road” in coarser language. Armistead maintains the driveway was not clear “in any capacity,” while Swartz said they cleared the upper part, out of view, so that the property did not appear open to the public.

The snowcat was found toward the end of the driveway by Jack Klim, a friend of Croce.

Deputy Armistead wrote that she spoke with Croce, who speculated that the snowcat was deliberately parked in a grove of trees near the intersection of the driveway and County Road 110 “in a way that would obscure it from view.”

“He (Croce) suspected that the suspects may have intended to return overnight with the intention of stealing it,” she wrote.

Croce declined to comment.

But the most significant discrepancy between the two versions is whether Swartz and Miller had permission to use the vehicle.

Swartz maintains he had written permission from an undisclosed person to use the snowcat. But in the affidavit, Armistead said she asked Swartz who gave him permission to use the vehicle, and he responded “nobody.”

“After discussing the investigation with the District Attorney’s office, we believe that both Mr. Swartz and Mr. Miller took control of and relocated the snowcat to an area obscured from view and not covered by surveillance video with the intent to conceal it from the owner,” Armistead concluded.

Christian Champagne, the district attorney for the 6th Judicial District, said he could not offer much comment on the open case, other than to say the investigation established probable cause that the crime was committed.

“We don't like to take cases that we don't think that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “That's part of our ethical standards.”

Swartz said he has little concern about the criminal charges, and expects them to be dismissed or reduced to a lesser charge.

“The thought that anyone would think that a piece of equipment like that could ever make it through Silverton unnoticed is absolutely absurd because (the construction site’s) on the other side of Silverton,” he said. “You would have had to take it right through (Greene) street – the thing is 12 foot wide, 12,000 pounds.”

Instead, he’s focused on his own legal action.

Swartz said he is filing a lawsuit against the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office and the author of the Standard story, DeAnne Gallegos.

Gallegos never contacted him for comment and Swartz said the arrest affidavit, which he has not read but was detailed in the paper, contained “ridiculous information.”

“The funny thing is, DeAnne is friends with my political rival with the mayor's office,” Swartz said.

Swartz has two rivals in the race, and named both of them when asked which rival he suspected Gallegos was backing. In addition to working for the Standard, Gallegos is the spokeswoman for San Juan County and the executive director of the Silverton Area Chamber of Commerce.

“This is not about a mayoral race, this is about reporting about a highly publicized theft in our local community,” Gallegos said, speaking as a staff writer of the paper.

She called Swartz’s accusations “absolutely false” and said she was not trying to assist either of his opponents.

“Silverton Standard decided to report directly from the sheriff's report and we will wait to hear what the defendants have to say once they have their day in court,” she said.

Reporting on an alleged theft, especially one that was as highly publicized as this, is both normal and expected, Gallegos said.

“A local who had a felony 4 warrant issued by a local judge & was arrested is big news in a small community,” she said in a text message. “To not report on it would have been (negligent) at best as a writer for a small town newspaper.”

Swartz and Miller are scheduled to make their first appearances in San Juan County Court on March 7.

rschafir@durangoherald.com