Grand Coulee — With help from a Lincoln County wheat farmer, the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday caught an inmate who slipped away from a jail work crew at the Okanogan County Fairgrounds on Tuesday.

Nathaniel D. Smallbeck, 18, was arrested in June when deputies found him hiding in a closet in an Orondo residence after a report of a break-in.

On Thursday morning, a Grand Coulee Police officer spotted him sitting on a guardrail on Highway 174, said Sheriff Frank Rogers. After seeing the officer, Smallbeck fled up a hill and onto a wheat farm, so the sheriff’s office responded.

By afternoon, the wheat farmer’s son, Jared M. Eagle, saw the teen out in their field and reported it to the sheriff’s office, Rogers said. He said after realizing a patrol car would have started a fire, Eagle offered to drive Undersheriff Joe Somday out to Smallbeck in his raised pickup truck.

Rogers said they drove through the field and arrested Smallbeck on suspicion of first-degree escape without incident. Smallbeck is a contract inmate from Douglas County.

Rogers said the teenager told him he hadn’t eaten in two days, and had tried to hitchhike from Okanogan, but no one picked him up so he had walked all the way to Grand Coulee and was heading for Spokane.

He said he didn’t have a good reason for escaping. “He’s just 18 years old and not using his brain,” the sheriff said.

— K.C. Mehaffey, World staff