Abundant Unwholesomeness At The Low-Budget Squalor Pit – November 4, 2012
• Wednesday, September 27 1:47 p.m. A downtown mortuary reported a man under a garbage bag in the alley hadn’t moved in two hours. But he wasn’t yet eligible for the business’s services, had just woken up and was preparing to mosey.
2:31 p.m. A small- to medium-sized, curly-haired woman was reported selling marijuana out of a big bag near a 10th Street taco truck. She was gone on police arrival.
2:46 p.m. A Uniontown supermarket had its dumpsters vandalized two nights in a row. The first night, a lock was jammed and someone wrote on it, “DON’T LOCK YOUR GARBAGE.” The lock was replaced, and the next night the same thing happened again.
7:14 p.m. An iPhone reported stolen at the bus station was GPS-tracked to an address at Hilfiker and Baldwin avenues.
9:28 p.m. A man turned up in a 12th Street front yard bleeding from the face. When he asked the residents if he could use their bathroom, they called police. The man said he had been whapped in the face with a skateboard, but wouldn’t provide details and walked away from an inquiring officer.
• Thursday, September 28 12:43 a.m. A man called in from the pit of squalor otherwise known as a cheap Valley West motel, saying he had absconded from parole, possessed heroin and wished to turn himself in. Arriving police encountered a wall of skeez in the form of multiple parolees, some aggressive. After all the searching and questioning, everyone was let go.
1:44 a.m. A dome light was left on in a car in the 1300 block of H Street.
3:20 a.m. A needy lower H Street resident phoned 911 multiple times through the night, but refused to come to the door.
5:54 a.m. His navigational faculties scrambled by a surfeit of cocktails, a man with fashionably oversized trousers wandered into the home of a Seventh Street resident he didn’t know, and when confronted, assaulted the resident. Pushed out of the house, the alcohol-reeking man continued to loiter there. The resident again contacted him, and Baggy McStinko said he didn’t remember the assault, but apologized for it anyway. Found near Seventh and K streets, bibulous B-Mack was arrested on an assault charge.
1:18 p.m. A man described as “homeless” – though it’s not clear how his housing status was determined – was reported swinging a bag of garbage around and yelling at people as he rode a bike on L.K. Wood Boulevard.
1:39 p.m. A shirtless man drooled and stumbled his way down Alliance Road until arrested on a public drunkenness charge.
1:52 p.m. A man arrested at a 13th Street marketplace had shoplifted $3 in baby clams.
9:56 p.m. An 18th Street resident heard noises, then a door close in her apartment. When she looked around, a roommate’s computer was missing. She then locked the doors and windows.
• Friday, September 29 12:05 a.m. He was clad in tan-striped t-shirt and khaki pants, she wore a tank top and shorts as they strode together past a Ninth Street pizza restaurant, arguing.
12:08 a.m. The thrill of peeing off a lofty precipice, or at least a second-floor Granite Avenue apartment, was not lost on these loud ’n’ hardy partiers.
12:28 a.m. As a California Avenue party wound down, police tracked the expense of four officers being occupied for 34 minutes, with the host to be billed for their services afterward.
12:39 a.m. Amid the general party din enveloping the town, a noise hotspot was reported somewhere near Roberts Court.
1:03 a.m. The noise, with music and yelling, metastasized to Roberts Way.
2:47 a.m. Alcohol was stolen from a Uniontown variety store.
9:16 a.m. Two people who don’t get along were advised to avoid contact after one spun his car wheels in the other guy’s driveway.
11:15 a.m. After yard gnomes disappeared from a Wilson Street residence, another neighborhood watch was born.
12:43 p.m. Visitors to the Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center beheld the serenity of fecund wetlands gilded in green, swooping waterfowl, shimmering amphibians and staggering drunks. One had a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand, while the other featured an upraised middle finger directed at the innocent nature lovers. The wild specimens that were not like the others made their way as far as South I Street, where psychomotor degradation compelled them to lie down in the middle of the roadway. One was arrested on a public drunkenness charge.
3:18 p.m. A group of people singing loudly was heard in the area of 11th and Spring streets.
5:57 p.m. An upset HSU student asked her friend what “the strongest pills she could take” would be. She said if her friend tried to stop her from killing herself, she would punch her. The friend called police, who located the woman and found her bleeding, apparently from a self-inflicted wound. She was committed as 5150.
7:51 p.m. A fast-talking man with a southern accent called to say that a naked man was walking around near a muliticolored car at an F Street laundromat.
• Saturday, September 30 2:43 a.m. A large black bear dined on succulent garbage in a Lynn Street yard.
9:23 a.m. A guy huffing nitrous oxide in a Samoa Boulevard parking lot was arrested.
12:52 p.m. A woman became upset that her son was smoking and had tried to pierce his lip, and that her daughter was an escort. Police tried to help, but she slammed the door on an officer.
7:26 p.m. A Spruce Way resident said his sister had assaulted him twice. A woman called from the same house, saying that the trimmers there were harassing her because she had some beers. Police visited and deemed someone unspecified incapable of caring for him or herself, and the person was committed.
• Sunday, October 1 8:21 a.m. A park ranger waded into a Community Forest campsite and made at least one arrest on warrants.
11:36 a.m. After drinking all night in an H Street alley, a woman’s speech was understandably slurred. She was cited for public drunkenness.
12:44 p.m. A Union Street resident said that while he was out of town, someone entered his home through an unlocked sliding glass door and stole his electric mandolin, valled at $200 to $500.
1:21 p.m. An elementary school student was suspended after bringing a bottle of Jack Daniels to school.
2:38 p.m. A woman brought a bag of “gold” to police and asked that police give it to her daughter.
5:29 p.m. A Valley East resident said someone had “lunged at him causing him to flench [sic].”
5:30 p.m. A drunk and uncooperative man called from lower H Street complaining that police hadn’t responded “for days” to a complaint that he had been “jumped” at the nearby Marsh.
8 p.m. A man reported a UFO on Janes Road. It was a remote control helicopter.
• Monday, October 2 11:08 a.m. After a 14 year old was arrested on Q Street with a four-pound package of marijuana, he said that he gets pot every week from an address there.
12:16 p.m. Only the most exuberant socialite can keep track of downtown’s mad social whirl these days. Someone said that “Hickie” stole her jacket and cell phone on the Plaza, and was giving heroin to “Smiley.”
• Tuesday, October 3 12:49 p.m. A man’s soon-to-be ex-wife’s father yelled and spit at him during a child custody exchange, but the spitting was was only collateral spatterage resulting from the dad yelling so juicily, and at such close range.
5:16 p.m. For many vagabonds and the fellow travelers they give a ride to Arcata, job one on arrival is unloading everyone’s shit from the van and spreading it all out on the sidewalk for sorting. Many cigarettes and refreshing beverages are sometimes necessary to this process.
