Kennewick man tries to hide his 14 felonies with a stolen ID, police say

A career criminal who once crashed into a bicyclist while high on meth is back in jail accused of trying to pass off a stolen ID as his own.

When a Franklin County sheriff’s deputy stopped him for a traffic violation Dec. 19, Troy H. Trusley, 41, handed over a driver’s license that didn’t belong to him, court documents said.

He was arrested by Deputy Cody Quantrell on five felony warrants.

Trusley asked the deputy to grab his wallet out of the car so he could take it to jail with him, documents said.

Quantrell searched the wallet before turning it over, and noticed a Social Security card with the same name that was on the identification Trusley used, court documents said.

The deputy contacted the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office and learned the license and Social Security card had been stolen from a Touchet man, and that a Walla Walla deputy was in the process of taking a theft report for the items, documents said.

On Wednesday, Trusley pleaded innocent in Franklin County Superior Court to second-degree identity theft.

The Kennewick man has since been transferred to the Benton County jail and is being held on $5,000 bail for each of the five warrants.

Trusley recently spent time in the state system on a 3 1/2-year sentence for second-degree burglary and second-degree theft.

It was a drug offender alternative sentence, which included nearly 2 1/2 years of probation after his release from prison.

In that July 2015 case, Trusley burglarized a Richland apartment complex office, along with the nearby Bonefish Grill restaurant where he used to work.

Trusley had been fired from Bonefish several months earlier and former co-workers could identify him from surveillance video even though he was wearing a clown wig.

Before that case, Trusley got five years and three months in prison for hitting bicyclist Cindy Easterday Goulet with his car.

In May 2009, Goulet was participating in the 25-mile Inland Empire Bike Ride on Columbia Park Trail in Kennewick.

She was in a group of four bicyclists riding in a line, and was the second-to-last in the group when she was hit from behind, crashing onto Trusley’s windshield before being thrown over the car.

Trusley was under the influence of methamphetamine and driving 32 to 37 mph in a 25-mph zone.

He was convicted by a judge of vehicular assault. He told the court he believed “it was an accident,” and unsuccessfully tried to get the case tossed on appeal.

His felony history also includes possessing stolen property, theft and identity theft, burglary and residential burglary, tampering with a witness, criminal impersonation and hit-and-run from injury collision.

Those convictions date to 1995 when Trusley was a juvenile.

This story was originally published January 3, 2019 at 5:04 PM.