Biography
Tre Arrow, born Michael James Scarpitti in 1974, became one of the most publicly visible figures of Pacific Northwest forest defense in the early 2000s. After dropping out of Florida State University and moving to Oregon in 1996, he announced he had to 'put my own body between the chain saws and the ancient forest.' In July 2000 he scaled the U.S. Forest Service building in downtown Portland and lived for eleven days on a nine-inch ledge to protest the planned logging of the Eagle Creek timber sale on the Mount Hood National Forest — an action that drew national press coverage and helped halt the sale.
In 2000 he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Oregon's 3rd Congressional District as the Pacific Green Party candidate, placing third behind Earl Blumenauer.
On June 1, 2001, three logging trucks belonging to the Ross Construction Company were burned in Estacada, Oregon, in an action claimed by the Earth Liberation Front in protest of a planned timber cut on Mount Hood. Authorities also accused Arrow and Jacob Sherman of the Easter 2001 arson of three concrete-mixing trucks in Portland. Federal prosecutors charged Tre Arrow as one of four participants. Three other activists pleaded out and cooperated; he refused. He fled to Canada in 2002 and lived underground there for nearly four years until his arrest in Victoria, British Columbia in March 2004 for shoplifting. He fought extradition through the Canadian courts before being returned to Oregon on February 29, 2008.
On June 3, 2008, he pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Portland to two counts of arson and was sentenced on August 12, 2008 to 78 months — six and a half years — in federal prison. He was held primarily at FCI Sheridan in Oregon. He was released to a halfway house in 2009 and finished his federal supervision in subsequent years. He has since returned to public environmental advocacy.
Custody-date sources and scope
- William McCall, Associated Press/MSNBC, February 29, 2008 (reprint): United States Marshals brought Arrow from Canadian imprisonment to Portland on extradition.
- Henry Read, Fifth Estate 381, Summer–Fall 2009: June 8, 2009 transfer to a Portland halfway house.
The incarceration date here marks entry into U.S. custody, not the earlier Canadian arrest or the later sentencing day. The release field marks departure from prison to a halfway house, not unconditional freedom. The earlier 2007 admission and 2014 release entries did not describe this documented prison interval. The Canadian arrest day remains unchanged pending resolution of conflicting accounts.
The Portland Observer, August 13, 2003, page A2 places the concrete-mixing truck arson at Easter 2001, before the June logging-equipment fires, not weeks afterward. It describes Arrow as still a fugitive in August 2003; indictment and sightings are not custody dates.
