Ellensburg trooper named WSP Trooper of the year
JOEL MARTIN | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 7 months, 1 week AGO
Sometimes being a state trooper is more than just pulling over speeders, as Trooper Thomas Megargle learned when he had to corral an emu that had made its way onto I-90.
COURTESY PHOTO/WASHINGTON STATE PATROL
Trooper Thomas Megargle of Ellensburg has been named the Washington State Patrol’s Trooper of the Year for 2025.
Joel Martin has been with the Columbia Basin Herald for more than 25 years in a variety of roles and is the most-tenured employee in the building. Martin is a married father of eight and enjoys spending time with his children and his wife, Christina. He is passionate about the paper’s mission of informing the people of the Columbia Basin because he knows it is important to record the history of the communities the publication serves. | March 10, 2026 3:00 AM
ELLENSBURG — Trooper Thomas Megargle of Ellensburg has been recognized as the Washington State Patrol District 6 Trooper of the Year.
“Ever since I've known Thomas … there's no one who's going to outwork him, that's for sure,” said Sgt. John Bryant, Megargle’s sergeant. “He has the drive, the internal drive to get things done.”
District 6 covers Chelan, Douglas, Grant, Kittitas, and Okanogan counties, which is a lot of space. Megargle wears a lot of hats, according to an announcement from the WSP. He is a member of the Rapid Deployment Team, a control tactics and weapons instructor., a field training officer and more, Megargle is also a certified car seat technician, Bryant said.
“They take care of the most important people in our lives, the children who are (sometimes) improperly placed in car seats,” Bryant said. “He's … so good about talking to people and saying, ‘OK, here's the proper way to put the car seat in.’ And then he's good with the kids, too, because no kid likes to be strapped in a car seat because it's got to be pretty tight. You want to make it so it's going to protect them in a collision. But he's he's got that knack because he himself is a family man. He has six kids.”
Being a family man is what steered him to the Washington State Patrol, Megargle said.
“My wife and I were newly married, and I found out that we were having our first kid,” he said. “I was working as a youth minister at that time, and I'd always wanted to do something that gave back to the community. I'd always been interested in the military … but I knew it wasn't the easiest way to raise a family.”
Megsargle did a ridealong with the Ellensburg Police Department, he said, and knew then that law enforcement was for him. He applied to several different agencies and was hired by the WSP in 2016 and commissioned in 2017.
As a state trooper, Megargle spends a lot of time on the highway.
“We have responsibility for I-90 from the top of Snoqualmie Pass, all the way down to the Columbia River, and then from the top of Blewett Pass, uh, all the way down (U.S.) 97 to I-82 halfway to Yakima,” he said. “We have a couple of large stretches of highway that we have responsibility for … We also work some of the smaller local state routes that we have in our beat, but the majority of our work is I-90.”
Megargle is especially good at policing the commercial traffic on I-90, which has increased in recent years, Bryant said.
“He'll make those stops, and the truckers will know he's out there,” Bryant said. “We're stopping more vehicles and let them know they’ve got to slow down because it's a busy road. If a (passenger) vehicle rolls over and blocks the lane, we can get that moved out pretty quick. A semi rolling over and blocking part of I-90, that's a big problem. It takes a while to open up the road. It causes delays and it hurts commerce, because you can't get goods and services to people on both sides of the state.”
Sometimes keeping the highway safe can turn a little weird, Megargle said, like the time an emu got loose on I-90.
“I was trying to keep it away from the highway,” Megargle said. “Eventually, after we sort of corralled it, its owner ended up showing up and he said that this was not the first time. The emu had gotten out before, the last time it had gotten out, it had gotten pepper sprayed by the State Patrol. And I could see why, because our uniforms are so shiny that it would just get fixated on our gold buttons, and start moving in as if it was going to peck you. They're really intimidating up close. They're big birds.
The process for selecting the Trooper of the Year is a highly competitive one, Bryant said. Last year Megargle came in second by a single point, and this year his margin was only a few points.
“It’s tight at the top because there are a lot of good troopers who are doing a good job, but you can only pick one for the district,” Bryant said.
Trooper Thomas Megargle of Ellensburg has been named the Washington State Patrol’s Trooper of the Year for 2025.ARTICLES BY JOEL MARTIN
Endless battle
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BASIN EVENTS: Oct. 16-24
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