They Come By Night To Flood The Zone With Pointlessness – May 29, 2011
• Saturday, April 29 12:55 a.m. Using available materials, anti-random parked truck activists attacked a silver pickup with a shell at an F Street laundromat. After launching a bottle at the truck, the three men joined urinary forces to top off the gas tank.
10:42 a.m. A woman with physical challenges asked for police assistance in establishing her access to public space; in this case, the Plaza during Farmers’ Market. Her type of wheelchair is a tricycle, which the law treats as a form of bicycle, and those are disallowed on the Plaza for pedestrian safety reasons. Once she registered the bike, she was advised that she could use the three-wheeler on the Plaza unless it creates a public safety issue, and the situation would be re-addressed should that occur.
11:58 a.m. Supposedly, a car window was broken and a black lab puppy stolen at 12th and G streets.
9:38 p.m. Following an unspecified assignation at a Valley West no-tell motel, a man returned to his Eureka manor to count his OxyContin pills. An inventory of his “center console” – apparently a form of medicine cabinet – revealed that they weren’t all there, and he suspected the woman who was still at the motel.
• Sunday, April 30 12:10 a.m. When flashlights were seen flaring inside the old Alliance Market, Arcata and Humboldt State police responded in force. A Eureka Police canine was requested, but then cancelled when two suspects were located and detained at gunpoint. One was arrested on a narcotics charge.
3:59 a.m. Two sketchazoids of the night turned up at a Janes Road motel, wantin’ ta… ta rent a room… yeah, that’s it. We wants ta rent a room and pay cash through that little cash door, dat door right dere where the cash money goes in. Told that cash couldn’t be accepted at that hour, the two lingered, entranced by the portal to riches and initially refusing to leave. Then something broke the spell – probably the same attention-deficit issues that delivered them to this inauspicious nexus in life – and they wandered off.
4:21 p.m. In the cold light of video, the damaged screen on an I Street front door looked less like a burglary attempt than it did simple vandalism.
8:48 a.m. The Intermodal Transit Facility is some kind of primal drunk-wallowing pit. At least enough of them go there to pass out, possibly exhausted by the sheer mental challenge of pronouncing the place’s syllabically discombobulating name.
11:56 p.m. A man in standard-issue skeezewad regalia – the classic hoodie and baseball cap ensemble – made off with a $20 bottle of his new best friend, Captain Morgan, from a Uniontown supermarket. A cop was there in three minutes, and the rum runner was soon Pink House-bound.
• Sunday, May 1 12:56 a.m.
Tavern Row, past the end of the bars
Offered habitat for five guitars
Whose players did jams
Till cops made them scram
The better to hear all the cars
1:13 a.m. Two dudes glugged from a big bottle of hooch in a Tavern Row alcove. Something about their hooligan-like guzzling technique led a passerby to conclude that there was going to be “trouble.”
3:24 a.m. A man’s voice was heard screaming “Get me out of here!” for 45 minutes on Blakeslee Avenue. Police contacted the fellow, who had become trapped during an early-morning expedition to the attic.
3:30 a.m. A drunken pilot at the helm of a vehicle with six people in it was pulled over at Samoa and K. Police arrested the driver, made pedestrians of the previously doomed passengers and had the vehicle towed away.
6:22 a.m. Six schlubs had a street soireé in the middle of 18th Street. When police arrived, five had departed, leaving the drunkenmost celebrant behind as jail fodder.
6:33 a.m. With two small children in the apartment, a man reportedly choked a woman, injuring her face. He then removed cell phones from the house and cut the land line. Police arrived, the woman was hospitalized and despite concern about knives and a gun, the man was arrested without incident.
9:47 a.m. A woman driving a van and being tailgated by another van noticed that the driver both wore a cowboy hat and was videotaping her, a combination to which she was neither accustomed nor prepared. Police and CHP stopped everyone and interviewed them, then sent them along.
11:11 a.m. Boy geniuses in Cahill Park shot at a five-year-old with a paintball gun.
2:55 p.m.
As three pairs of drummer-hands fluttered
Some bongo apostates went nutters
When cops para-diddled
To Plaza’s mean middle
The bongo-beat bastion was shuttered
6:02 p.m. At Giuntoli Lane and Valley West Boulevard, the freelance foot fetishist was again soliciting women, this time posing as a massage school student. His pitch was that by rubbing a woman’s feet, it would help relieve her back and shoulder pain.
6:36 p.m. Vehicle taillights and housings were stripped from a vehicle parked on I Street.
11:07 p.m. A Fern Way resident took note of unusual activity in the ’hood, including a microwave oven that had somehow appeared on a front lawn and fresh, white-painted graffiti on a neighbor’s house. And then there was this drunk-looking guy with a backwards baseball cap roaming around in the area carrying things. Coincidence? Police found and arrested him on a public drunkenness charge.
11:33 p.m. Some dudes circling the block at Alliance and Foster were said to have as their mission, “starting some crap.”
• Monday, May 2 9:40 a.m. A man whose wallet was stolen from a locker at the Community Pool was uncooperative with staff and responding police. He said making a report would do no good, and that he would investigate the matter himself. By the time he left, he had become verbally abusive and gave no more information.
10:18 a.m. High school kids have discovered some storage sheds on 14th Street, and may be using them as refuges for time-honored teen naughtiness like smoking, etc. This occurs between 8 and 8:30 a.m. and around noon-thirty.
11:16 a.m. – 12:16 p.m. A bomb threat led to a lockdown and search of the high school, but it was a hoax.
11:43 a.m. A parking meter malfunctioned on Union Street.
3:06 p.m. Loud music blasted from an Alliance Road apartment. Earlier that day a baby and toddler had been found crying and unattended in a breezeway. Mom got a talking to.
8:17 p.m. A BMW and silver truck parked in the middle of 12th Street, their occupants “drinking beer and eating hamburger.”
• Tuesday, May 3 12:17 a.m. Two youths, one with a telltale backwards baseball cap of the type fancied by free-lance ignorami, were reported vandalizing the Ball Park, a business and an electrical box with spray paint. Police found and arrested one man on a charge of malicious mischief.
8:30 a.m. A man said that he was driving behind a garbage truck at Alliance and Spear when it deliberately drove into the bike lane so as to shear the buds off of trees there. A letter was sent to the garbage company.
1:07 p.m. A man came to the police station with legal questions about cannabis cultivation. He was told that growing marijuana for commercial sales is against the law.
1:32 p.m. A woman and two men had fashioned fake knives out of cardboard and were pretending to stab each other at Samoa and K, even falling on the ground and writhing around as though injured. Police warned them.
2 p.m. Though they were divorced in 2005, he says she is still using his name, address and telephone number as though they were married in order to open credit card accounts.
3:29 p.m. An entertainment venue doorman brought in a bouquet of IDs confiscated from people to whom they did not belong. Two were California driver’s licenses, one was a California ID card and another a Michigan DL. All were sent back to the agencies which had issued them.
3:55 p.m. Another wallet, and this time keys were stolen from a locker at the Community Pool.
4:23 p.m. A disc golf bag and 11 discs were stolen from the disc golf course in the Community Forest.
4:39 p.m. A man was reported pushing a green wheelbarrow full of animal poop on 12th Street. He is said to dump the feces somewhere nearby, and it was called an ongoing problem.
7:22 p.m. You might think that someone in his fifties would by that time have, if not the judgment, at least the life experience to not tote an Airsoft rifle around in public, in this case at Davis Way and Stromberg Avenue. A caller said that as he passed by, the rifleman held the firearm up in the air. Police located the man and his weapon, determined that it was an air gun and got him to move his activities to a backyard where it wouldn’t alarm and frighten people.
7:38 p.m. A man with a possible baseball cap and shopping cart lingered in a Valley West dumpster corrall. He was using it as a clothes-changing station and hanging his moist duds up to dry.
• Wednesday, May 4 1:52 a.m. It’s the middle of the night at your shit job at the mini-mart, and oh, joy – here comes that crazy old man who previously stole things and was run off, back now to help enliven your dreadful graveyard shift with his special brand of mystery, intrigue and unnecessary tension. Taking a break from his busy schedule, the elderly imp is skirting the fringes of the fluorescent zone, not entering the store, but not going away either, just prancing in the shadows and flipping you off the whole time. You call police, they come and tell the beanie-topped, finger-wielding, superannuated sprite to stay away on pain of trespassing.
• Wednesday, May 4 8:22 a.m. A rare but not unheard-of species of aggressive driver, the Traction-Disregarding She-Dunce, “peeled out” from the parking lot at a Baldwin Street elementary school, an excellent place to hone one’s reckless driving prowess. The TDSD was sent a warning letter on the questionable assumption that she can both read and maintain an attention span for the duration of the written admonishment.
12:29 p.m. Someone set garbage on fire at Aloha Way and West End Road, damaging a fence.
12:58 p.m. Cooper Building tenants again complained of dope smoke coming through the vents from a store there, the billowing THC smog irritating one businessperson’s allergies. When police arrived, two of the store’s employees were outside, 25 feet away from the building, smoking cigarettes. An officer walked through the building, but 14 minutes after the initial report, all traces of the purported pot pollution had dissipated.
