Running Plates Pays Off for Officer : Police: Gaylen Mattson often checks out cars parked at Costa Mesa motels. His instincts led to arrest of young fugitive.

Officer Gaylen Mattson isn’t shy about saying it: He has a passion for pilfered cars.

“I loved working stolen vehicles,” said Mattson, an auto theft investigator for seven years.

It was that passion that brought police to the motel room door of an armed 14-year-old murder suspect early Friday.

Mattson, 38, had clocked in at 2 a.m., five hours before his regular shift begins. He wanted to make a little overtime and work some familiar turf, cruising Costa Mesa’s motels and running license plates on his police car’s computer in search of leads. Maybe the checks would yield a stolen car or an outstanding warrant.

He rolled through the lot of one motel and checked a few plates which came back clean. But when Mattson pulled into the Sea Lark Motor Hotel at 3 a.m. and ran the plate on a 1987 Dodge Daytona, his screen flashed “felony.”

The car was stolen, and might be linked to a homicide, his computer told him. Chances were, the suspect was inside the motel.

“It popped up on the screen and it was a very serious crime,” said Mattson, who has been on the force for nearly 16 years. “I run a lot of plates because you do have a lot of transient people in and out of the motels, and a lot of them are on the run. . . . It leads to a lot of arrests.”

Mattson called in reinforcements and sheriff’s bloodhounds and checked with the clerk to get the room number of the car’s driver. He then set to work preparing a perimeter around the motel. As three officers gathered quietly in the motel parking lot and prepared to block the stairs leading to the second-floor landing, Mattson stood out front, coordinating the effort.

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The car had been stolen Thursday in Carson City, and its 63-year-old owner had been found dead with a shotgun blast to his side at a local shooting range. But before officers could get details of the Nevada crime or find out whether their suspect in room 58 was armed, the motel clerk called the room and tipped the guest.

Peter Quinn Elvik, 14, burst out of the motel room and leaped 20 feet off the motel balcony, escaping into the night and eluding bloodhounds.

He was arrested at about 7:30 Friday night on a street near his parents’ Tustin home.

Although Elvik eluded police for 16 hours, without Mattson’s work they would not have found him in the first place, Lt. John FitzPatrick said.

“It was great police work,” he said. “He’s the type of officer who has that sixth sense. His passion is for auto theft.”

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Mattson, who was assigned to the patrol division in January as a training officer, had for 6 1/2 years before that been an investigator in the auto thefts division. During those years, he and his partner began a program in which they planted cars borrowed from dealerships with tracking devices and waited for thieves to hit.

The two detectives were so successful that they helped other departments throughout the county begin similar programs, FitzPatrick said.

To Mattson, Friday’s find was just one of many, a lucky hit during a tedious process. Earlier this summer, he arrested a San Diego burglary suspect at a Costa Mesa motel after he ran a plate.

Other routine checks have netted suspects with felony arrest warrants on a variety of charges.

About two or three times a week, Mattson starts his daily shift at 2 a.m., five hours early, he said. But the pre-dawn cruising of motel lots doesn’t always yield something.

“Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t,” he said. “Sometimes you have to look a little deeper. But it does happen like this a lot. Ninety-five percent of police work is just chance like that.”