Two years ago, authorities named a then 68-year-old grandfather as the prime suspect in several brazen BASE jumps from some of the D.C. area’s tallest buildings.
The investigation into Chuck Moeser, a formerly elite and flamboyant local runner, was featured in a front-page story in The Washington Post. But the statute of limitations for trespassing expired as Fairfax County police were building a case. If Moeser was the jumper, he got away with as many as six leaps, including a harrowing 32-story plunge over evening traffic.
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Despite the police probe and public exposure, police think Moeser, now 70, returned to the Tysons area to parachute again. Fairfax County police arrested him Monday night in connection with leaps from buildings on the Capital One campus near the McLean Metro station that occurred this year and last.
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Moeser has been charged with three counts of misdemeanor trespassing. Police said his son Lee Moeser has also been charged in connection with a jump last year. BASE jumping, which involves parachute leaps from tall structures, is not a crime in Virginia, but authorities try to discourage it because it often results in fatalities and can injure people below.
In an interview Tuesday, Chuck Moeser denied he made the leaps.
“This whole thing is ridiculous. I don’t get how you can get arrested for something when no one had told me I had trespassed,” Moeser said. “I don’t think they have any proof I did anything like that.”
Lee Moeser did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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A mystery 32 stories up: Is a grandfather leaping from some of the area's tallest buildings?
The latest probe kicked off after Fairfax County police got a report that someone on the night of Oct. 11 parachuted from a 410-foot building that is under construction on the Capital One campus, according to a December search warrant filed in Fairfax County court.
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A Capital One official confirmed after reviewing security camera footage that three subjects had trespassed on the property and jumped from the Block A building to the roadway below, according to the search warrant.
The police investigator then obtained surveillance photos and videos of the suspects as they walked down Capital One Drive and, according to the search warrant, recognized one of the men as Chuck Moeser from his previous investigations of the Sterling man.
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After midnight on Oct. 12, Moeser, who also is a home improvement contractor, wrote in a Facebook post that has now been deleted, “Got to make a base jump tonight w two awesome dudes.”
Fairfax County police also charged Moeser and his son in connection with April 4, 2020, BASE jumps that first surfaced on Reddit last year. One of the videos showed a jumper leaping from the corner of a skyscraper that is under construction. The jumper falls swiftly, before releasing a parachute and disappearing behind another building.
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A second dash-cam video shows a jumper with a parachute landing in the middle of multilane Scotts Crossing Road near the Tysons Capital One Center campus, which includes the headquarters of the bank.
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“I was driving thru Tysons around 6:30 this evening and caught some guy parachuting off of a high rise building on my dashcam,” wrote the user who posted the video. “He landed right in the middle of the street, picked up his ‘chute, and started running away.”
On April 7, 2020, police got information that Moeser posted a video of a BASE jump on his Facebook page, according to the search warrants.
Capital One said in a statement they are working with law enforcement.
The arrest appears to bring an end to a long cat-and-mouse game between Moeser and authorities.
Fairfax County police first started getting reports about BASE jumping in Tysons during the summer of 2018, but the jumps only became public in March 2019 when Fox 5 news said a “concerned citizen” sent dramatic videos of some of the jumps.
One showed a jumper landing on a roadway, while another showed a man’s parachute fluttering down on top of a car in a darkened parking lot as he lands. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you up!” the jumper yells to an apparently startled driver.
A police investigation followed the airing of the videos and police obtained the contents of Moeser’s Facebook page, which included a photo they said showed Moeser atop the Lumen building, according to a search warrant. The caption read: “born to b wild.” The 417-foot, 32-story Lumen building was then under construction.
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Investigators were never able to determine when exactly the jump videos were created, and they concluded they could not charge Moeser because it was not clear the jumps had occurred within a one-year statute of limitations for trespassing.
Moeser had been a fixture on the local running scene, before retiring in 2005. He scored age-class top 10 finishes in the Army Ten-Miler and Marine Corps Marathon during the ’80s, ‘90s and early 2000s. He beat Olympic marathon champion Frank Shorter and four-time New York City Marathon winner Bill Rodgers in a 1995 race.
Moeser was known for running shirtless, which he claimed he did to intimidate other runners who didn’t share his six-pack physique, and antics, which are detailed on local running forums and seem to shade into fiction.
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One user claimed Moeser pounded nails into his arms before marathons to deaden the pain of running, while another relayed a “legend” that Moeser carried his son out of the Grand Canyon after he was injured on a run. Friends said Moeser took up BASE jumping in his mid-50s.
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“He was legendary,” Ron Kulik, Moeser’s running partner in the ’90s, told The Post in 2019. “It’s like Wyatt Earp. Is the legend of Wyatt Earp true or not? The answer is yes. How much? You really have to dig.”
BASE jumping first gained prominence as a sport in the 1970s. BASE is an acronym that stands for the four types of objects jumpers typically launch from: building, antenna, span and earth. It is considered more dangerous than skydiving because the short jumps offer less margin for error. An online magazine that maintains a database of BASE jumping-related deaths lists 418.
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Moeser was interviewed by The Washington Post in 1987 before competing in the Marine Corps Marathon. He said that as a young man he was drafted into the Army, where military records show he received training as a Ranger, parachutist and military skier in the early 1970s.
“That was probably the best thing that ever happened to me,” Moeser told The Post of being drafted. “I’d have either been the president of a company or in jail by now. I had a lot of extra energy. That’s probably the reason I run so much now.”
Now, he could go to jail. Each trespassing charge carries a fine and a sentence of up to 12 months behind bars.