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A MAN mistaken for accused child killer Travis Decker has spoken out about his ordeal after becoming the target of a major manhunt.
Decker, 32, vanished six weeks ago after he allegedly killed his three daughters during a custody visit on May 30 in Washington.
Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5, were found suffocated to death at an abandoned campsite near Icicle Creek on June 2, where Decker’s bloody truck was also located.
Since then, a major multiple agency manhunt has been triggered with the public urged to call in any suspected sightings of the fugitive.
These were most recently reported in Idaho City and the surrounding area which the authorities officially debunked on Thursday.
Now, the target of the manhunt has revealed what happened and how he easily avoided cops without even knowing he was being hunted.
Nick from Garden City, Idaho, was celebrating Fourth of July weekend camping in the woods with a friend before exploring the Bear Creek Trail alone in the Sawtooth National Forest.
It was this “fateful” trip walking the trail on his own that he unknowingly sparked panic and a couple of tip phone-ins to police on July 5.
“I took this fateful trip on my own to the Bear Creek trail, and here we are,” he told KIVITV.
Cops had been informed of two separate sightings of the triple homicide suspect – both of which Nick confirmed were actually him.
Nick is white, has brown hair, a beard, and tattoos like the murder suspect and appears to be a similar age.
The first person to call in a sighting claimed the man did not make eye contact with her, though Nick later explained he was wearing sunglasses so it would have been hard to tell if he had or not.
After spending the night in the woods with his friend on Friday night, he stayed elsewhere Saturday before returning home on Sunday to start work in Boise on Monday.
Oh my God, they think I’m that guy!
Nick
While Nick turned up to work like every other day, cops were swarming the Sawtooth National Forest to hunt him down.
“Everything seemed normal until my friend who was up there with me sent a text saying, ‘Bro, there’s a manhunt for a killer that was in the campground with us’,” Nick explained.
“He sent me a news article and it described a sighting and this manhunt sparked off out of our campsite when we were there.
“Your instinct isn’t to think ‘that was me’ – My first thought was, ‘Oh my God we spent the night next to a murderer, that’s frightening’.”
“On Tuesday the dots started connecting as news developed with better detail and I realized someone reported me as Decker,” he wrote in a Reddit post.
But cops didn’t catch up with Nick until he contacted them and they visited him at work days later on July 9.
After realising, “Oh my God, they think I’m that guy,” Nick had to make multiple calls to get in touch with the cops.
He described it as “me locating me for them”, highlighting how he “evaded a manhunt by pure accident by just doing what I do in Nowhere, Idaho, with the help of casual remote dirt road cruising.”
After he got in contact, cops arrived at his work armed with grabs from surveillance cameras from the bar and grill in Featherville where he had stopped to get a burger.
“They friendly interrogated me for a half hour,” he recalled when speaking to the local news outlet.
“The search described me like, the hair, the beard, the hat, the glasses, my tattoo, earrings, my shirt… Shorts were a different color, my shoes, the backpack, the location.”
Cops were quick to confirm that Nick was not the wanted man, and while he says the tipsters did the right thing, he has urged people to “be careful”.
“This has been a little tumultuous time for me and people around me,” he said.
“In my opinion, I don’t realistically look like that guy. They saw me from a distance,” Nick added.
Now he is planning on returning to the hills with his dad this weekend as the hunt for Decker continues.
Meanwhile, experts have said that time is running out for the fugitive as his tricks for surviving in the wilderness may be drying up.
And while Nick’s story highlighted the ease at which he unknowingly managed to evade cops, a woman who thought she saw Decker last month has slammed police for “not following up for weeks”.
Timeline of the search for Travis Decker
Paityn, 9; Evelyn, 8; and Olivia Decker, 5, were found dead at a campground after they were last seen on a custody visit to their dad.
Below is a timeline of events:
May 29: Cell phone activity shows that the girls’ dad, Travis Decker, drove to the Rock Island Campground and left.
May 30: 5 pm – Travis Decker picks the three girls up from their mom, Whitney Decker.
8 pm – Travis Decker is supposed to return the girls but doesn’t. Whitney Decker calls him and it goes to voicemail.
9:45 pm – Whitney Decker calls the Wenatchee Police Department to report her daughters missing.
Travis Decker’s truck is seen driving westbound on Highway 2.
Washington State Patrol is contacted for an Amber Alert but said the situation didn’t match their criteria.
May 31 : WPD issues an Endangered Missing Persons Alert.
June 2: 3:45 pm – Travis Decker’s truck is found empty at Rock Island Campground with two bloody handprints and items inside.
5 pm – Cops search the area and find the bodies of the three girls.
June 3: 9:30 am – Cops notify the public that they are still searching for Decker.
2 pm – WPD tells the public that the three girls were found dead and that Travis Decker is still on the loose.
June 8: Federal authorities take over search efforts.
June 9: Autopsy results confirm three girls were murdered by suffocation.
June 13: An affidavit revealed Whitney described Travis as having “recent mental health concerns.”
“She provided the examples of randomly leaving or waking her up by screaming at her in the middle of the night,” it read.
“She also said near the end of the marriage he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder that she believes he currently does not take medications for.”
June 17: New audio of Travis in court fighting for custody of his daughters is released.
“I understand that my current position when I’m by myself isn’t ideal, but my daughters aren’t a part of that,” he said in September 2024.
“I only get to see them over the weekends and camping is something that the four of us have done since the three of them were in diapers.”
June 18: Jennifer Rice spotted a man meeting Decker’s description in Idaho City while leaving Gentry’s Outpost at 4.21 pm.
June 20: Memorial is held where Whitney speaks publicly about girls for first time.
July 5: US Marshals say a family spotted a man believed to be Travis Decker in the Sawtooth National Forest in Idaho.
July 10: The sighting at the campsite has now been ruled out by authorities.
