Texting Ex’s Vexing Pledges, Dog And Swim Fin Swipe Perplexes – August 24, 2010
• Monday, July 19 12:31 p.m. A sack of syringes was found at a K Street car wash. The bonus bag o’ biohazard was picked up for destruction.
3:31 p.m. When a 12th Street resident returned home after three weeks away, she found a blue BMX bike locked and chained to a bench in her backyard.
5:28 p.m. A dark-haired man with a vestigial sense of style manifest in his scraggly goatee staggered down 13th Street, catching brief naps on the sidewalk along the way. He intermittently careened, with maniacal drunken-zombie resolve, onto northbound Alliance Road, there encountering an officer. Murkily sensing a threat to his way of lifestyle, the man’s limbic system fired erratically under the burden of its synapse-quenching alcohol baste, and then, foregoing further napping, the sodden specimen somehow blundered his bibulous bulk up the trail to the high school. There, he stood out rather strikingly, persisting in his oxen-like migration to nowhere until easily identified, then electrified, then hospitalized, then Pink Housed.
7:32 p.m. A Frederick Avenue resident reported that her dog, which had been locked in the bathroom, had been stolen from her home sometime during the last hour. Police called an L.K. Wood Boulevard residence, where a man picked up the phone and then disconnected the line. A civil standby followed, and the purloined pooch was returned.
9:33 p.m. An unknown slithy tove hit the jackpot at 14th and Union streets, where an unlocked car yielded a messenger bag with two laptop computers – a Dell Inspiron and a MacBook Pro. All told, the owner was out $2,200 and the data.
• Tuesday, July 20 9:30 a.m. A pickup truck at a Janes Road mini-mart was entered through the back sliding window and everything gone through.
9:40 a.m. A short guy maybe in his forties was sort of seen near a Samoa Boulevard shed before he headed away westward in a pickup truck. Inside said shed, tools had been placed in a garbage can.
10:12 a.m. Two men came to the door of an I Street house with a strange story about a motorcycle with its light left on out front. The resident thought the free-lance headlight activists seemed to be casing the joint.
12:27 p.m. At 12th and P streets, reported a bicyclist, a black collie-type dog lies in wait for unsuspecting passersbicyclists. Hiding in the bushes, it springs on the bike, chasing it and biting the rider. The aggrieved cyclist refused to give his name or number, but asked that patrols be stepped up in the area.
12:37 p.m. It wasn’t until a police officer had a talk with the dog’s owner that the person realized that releasing a big black dog into the children’s playground wasn’t the best idea.
2:33 p.m. A tent valued at $1,600 turned up missing after use at a Plaza festival.
4:58 p.m. A Benjamin Court burglary netted the thief a shotgun with an unknown serial number.
8:19 p.m. A man had a rag tied around his head, which may have helped prevent any residual gray matter from sloshing out the side as he leapt and bounded in and out of traffic at 11th and H streets and made his way to the Plaza – inexplicably passing up the donut shop and its limitless potential for amplifying crazed public behavior – all the while picking fights with people who had other plans for the evening. The bandannaed bounder was advised on the non-sustainability of this behavior pattern and agreed to go home for the evening.
8:40 p.m. Carrying on with the public goofiness, a man in a blue beanie was reported yelling at children and passersby at a Union Street apartment complex. He explained to police that he had been kicking his so-called friends out, and they did not go peacefully. Screeching and growling at strangers assisted the ouster in some unexplained way.
• Wednesday, July 21 12:57 a.m. Motor control was not necessary the forte of an the alco-hobbyist on I Street. Too bad, given his size and tendency to wallow in the roadway and pick fights with people. Police located the blubbering blob and his vile sleeping bag behind a nearby donut shop and arrested him.
11:44 a.m. License plates were stolen off a vehicle in Lewis Court.
12:42 p.m. A citizen reported a variety of ever-more improbable events, but hey, you never know. First, he had been drugged on the Plaza over the weekend. He was also being stalked by a serial killer from Hawaii, who was responsible for a person gone missing, and who is a copycat criminal in the mold of the Green River Killer.
1:06 p.m. Any notion that a covered carport open to the elements (including the all-pervasive fog of dishonesty) represents Fort Knox-like protection against theft has been vanquished on Park Avenue. The unlocked car there had at one time contained a backpack, iPod Touch and video camera all valued at $6,000. Then it didn’t.
7:18 p.m. Some kids joyously chumped out a grown-up in a field near a Valley West hotel, theatrically stating “OH MY GOD! THERE’S A DEAD BODY OVER THERE.” The adult dutifully reported this to police who went and traipsed the field, finding neither kids nor bod.
10:57 p.m. Alcohol didn’t exactly clarify the issues ’twixt a man and a woman, but it was immensely helpful in fueling the dispute’s intensity. Following unsuccessful negotiations, he reported her entering his house through a back window and stealing his computer and a set of swim fins. After a stressful interlude, she came back and returned the laptop, but then, in a startling and somewhat slurred driveway allegation, she claimed that he had stolen her laptop computer a year ago. An officer searched the guy’s home for it, to no avail. Given the hour, the alcohol factor and the hopelessness of actually settling anything at this point, it was decided that she should park the car and wobble home.
• Thursday, July 22 10:08 a.m. “THAT’S IT, YOU HOME-WRECKING BITCH, I TOLD YOU TO STAY AWAY FROM MY FAMILY.” This text-epistle was received from the wife of a Eureka man that an Arcata woman had met in a drug abuse support group.
2:04 p.m. After some change went missing from the living room, a woman initiated a sting operation against her roommate by leaving “a small stack of bills” there and going out. When she returned, the cash was gone. When confronted, the roommate admitted that she took it and apologized. But still missing werejewelry, DVDs and more totaling maybe $400. At this point, eviction seemed like the only viable solution.
2:48 p.m. A woman made a variety of statements that added up to concern for her mental well-being. These included her purse being stolen, people following her, her daughter going missing and a blood vessel in her hand popping.
4:20 p.m. A man’s quest to obtain two beers without paying the $4.50 at a Uniontown shopping center ended not with a bubbly buzz, but an arrest.
5:03 p.m. A fancied-up bicycle didn’t survive the previous night locked up in an Eighth Street alley. Well, it may have survived, but it definitely changed custody, into unknown hands. The bike, which had been borrowed from a friend, is done up as a “chopper” motorcycle, with a fake gas tank and everything. $300.
5:24 p.m. A C Street resident complained of a man in checkered shirt and dreadlocks “walking back and forth.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was more – the loopy pedestrian had taken water from the resident’s home.
• Friday, July 23 9:42 a.m. Having drunk a hearty breakfast, a most unwelcome man clad in a black jacket and at least one matching pant tried to muscle his way onto a city bus, against all reason. No bus ride for you! Arrested on a public drunkenness charge.
10:25 a.m. Officials at a South G Street marsh interpretive center reported a feral kitten trapped in a trash can out front. They didn’t wish to handle the wildkit on the possibility that it might be fighty-bitey-diseasey, and asked that police respond and remove it. But the feral foundling extracted itself and toddled off.
11:15 a.m. Four travelers set up a temporary party zone on a vehicle parked square in the middle of South I Street, refusing to move when a vehicle approached them. This canny attention-getting gambit paid off well, with inevitable police attention, an arrest for public drunkenness and a case initiated for receiving stolen property.
12:17 p.m. An Ariel Way dog is often loose and frequently charging at people, complained a concerned parent.
1:44 p.m. Banging was heard in a Hidden Creek Road apartment whose resident was known to be out of town. Plus, the rear sliding glass door was off its track. Police soon arrived and made a burglary arrest.
1:50 p.m. A parent asked to be notified when mountain lions were seen in the vicinity of her daughter’s school on Janes Road – a “black panther” was reported there a few days previous – so she could pick the child up instead of having her walk to the mother’s workplace.
2:03 p.m. A traveler entered a Heindon Road business, went in the bathroom and adopted a new hobby – not leaving. Over the course of the half-hour the man dallied in there, he continuously rehearsed his toilet-flushing skills to the growing consternation of the staff. Following another 10 minutes of creative interaction with the plumbing, the man had emerged from his loo-lair and plunked down in front of a publicly accessible computer, around which a bubble of residual marijuana stench came to form. After noodling for a bit, the man of leisure got up and wandered out the door to commit more random distraction elsewhere.
2:43 p.m. A freeway user reported a box hanging from twine off the “Sunny Brae overpass.” APD asked the CHP to tell Caltrans that there was a “large appliance box” on the side of the freeway.
4:24 p.m. A Valley West business reported an employee stealing.
6:33 p.m. Her landlord keeps showing up in her house, using her stuff.
8:37 p.m. A Lewis Avenue resident made three statements to an on-call county mental health worker: “I’m going to become a hermit,” “I don’t like people’s attitudes” and “I’m going to get a gun.” The county official called APD to check on the attitude-disliking, gun-aspiring recluse. At the man’s last-known address, a lot of loud banging was heard and then he appeared in a window, wielding a broom to impressive effect. After all this, he turned down a free ride to the crazy house.
8:57 p.m. A caller noticed a bicycle on the ground and a woman limping and crying as another person, apparently a stopped motorist, assisted her.
9:54 p.m. He was another one of those ultra-intox jobs that “friends” dump off at the ER and then boogie. He had a laceration on his nose, an abraded knee and a less-than-helpful affect towards his caregivers. After police were called in, he explained that he didn’t want to go to jail, but had concerns about “radiation.” He was told that if police had to come back, he would go to jail.
• Saturday, July 24 12:57 a.m. A man thanked staff at a Plaza tavern for a fulfilling evening by first refusing to leave, then storming out amid a flurry of profanities and threats.
2:15 a.m. A caller reported upper Beverly Drive falling under the sinister spell of the Three Horsemen of the Aschnockalypse: a loud party, loud music… and bongos. An officer set the controls for the heart of the bongo-atrocity-in-progress. The host was located, and agreed to contain the bongo furies within the domicile.
