Arcata Police Log: Practitioners Of The Howling Arts Blurt And Bluster Across The Landscape
• Monday, Febuary 4 10:58 a.m. A neighbor forced entry into a Highland Court residence and discovered a deceased person. The coroner was called.
11:59 a.m. Officers responded to a reported fight at an Alliance Road appartment complex where a naked two-year-old was also seen wandering toward the street. Soon, someone was headed to jail on an unspecified charge and a child seat was required for delivery of the tot to Child Welfare Services.
12:36 p.m. A backpack containing a laptop computer was left in plain sight in a student’s car parked on C Street.
1:02 p.m. An Arcata woman’s credit card was used to buy $338 in eventual landfill contents at a Best Buy in Minnesota. The charge was rescinded.
3:56 p.m. A woman walking from Arcata High School to a G Street business was followed by a bearded, beanied man driving a light blue pickup truck. When he stopped and got out at 17th Street, she ran.
4:14 p.m. A woman tethered her goat to a stake near an 11th Street store, only to return and find the animal (and the stake) gone. It was later located.
• Tuesday, February 5 9:57 a.m. A bebackpacked, enhoodied, baseball cap-topped hangarounder antagonizes an H Street business by banging on the front window and yelling when patrons are inside. He then courageously retreats to the alley across the street to blur in with the other indolent millabouts.
1:31 p.m. A former City Council candidate well-versed in the howling arts was declined service at a local business because of his volatile/erratic behavior. This set off more howling and volatile/erratic behavior in the form of threats to ruin the business.
6:16 p.m. A business customer with whom an employee had had an “altercation” in the past came back to the business and stared discomfitingly at the employee.
10:06 p.m. The brown-eyed, brown haired young white couple in jeans and hoodies went into a Plaza restaurant/bar, ordered their $19.85 meal and savored it, knowing full well they planned to slip out without paying.
• Wednesday, February 6 12:47 a.m. A Westwood-area apartment resident reported a man outside her window pleasuring himself.
1:50 a.m. Someone broke into a J Street resident’s home and stole all her cigaretttes.
4:38 p.m. A Wyatt Lane resident left her purse and an empty laptop computer case in her car. Both were stolen.
9:32 p.m. A camper at the Veterans Hall was reported standing on the roof, spitting.
• Thursday, February 7 9:04 a.m. A lower G Street shed yielded wine and tools to burglars. Two suspects were immediiately arrested.
11:38 a.m. A J Street resident was reported throwing objects and peeing in a neighbor’s yard.
11:36 p.m. A tall, bearded, beanie-topped man on Baldwin Street was reported hunched over, then leaning against a fence. Described as “very, very, very weird,” Mr. Hunch ’n’ Lean gave the caller “a bad feeling.”
• Friday, February 8 12:06 p.m. A man dropped his wallet on the sidewalk in the 300 block of Ninth Street, and didn’t immediately pick it up. Then a guy walked past him, and when he looked down, his wallet was gone. The wallet was retrieved from behind a nearby home.
12:06 p.m. A man dropped his wallet on the sidewalk in the 300 block of Ninth Street, and didn’t immediately pick it up. Then a guy walked past him, and when he looked down, his wallet was gone. The wallet was retrieved from behind a nearby home.
12:33 p.m. A witness said two men were walking across H Street when one pulled a pistol out of his pants, cocked it and put it back in the waistband of his pants.
1:48 p.m. A local employment company reported the younger half of a mother-and-son law firm in Texas who had threatened to “beat him up,” referring to an agent who works there. The son told APD that someone there had been rude to his mom, so he called and told the company, “Talk to my mother like that again, I’ll come and beat you. And don’t ever call here again or I’ll sue you.”
3:07 p.m. Two “transient looking” men in beanie caps were reported walking near the high school with a pair of bulls, but there was a less fanciful explanation: it was almost certainly the two yakherders accompanying their animals on their spiritual quest to purify “this mess you call Arcata.”
10:18 p.m. A man at a Valley West convenience mart took a burrito and refused to return it, then refused to leave, then left.
• Saturday, February 9 9:56 a.m. A man in a hoodie at 10th and G streets acted as sort of a daylight own crier. Except that instead of ringing a bell and proclaiming, “10 a.m. and all’s well!” he howled things like “#*^$@#!” and “%#$%)*&!”
1:13 p.m. A baseball-capped man in Valley West announced at a gas station that he would “chop someone’s head off.” A witness interpreted this as aggressive behavior.
10:02 p.m. A woman just released from jail forced her way into a Buttermilk Lane home. A man there yelled for another house occupant to call police, and soon both were in the kitchen trying to eject her. The woman was arrested on a charge of violating a court order.
• Sunday, February 10 5:18 a.m. A sub-optimal decisionmaker lingering in the candy department of a Uniontown variety store was asked to leave several times, but seemed preoccupied with a conversation with himself. He was arrested on warrants, plus charges of probation violation, drug possession as well as possession of what Frank Zappa once referred to as “a dope fiend device.”
10:11 a.m. The coroner was called to an 18th Street address.
11:48 a.m. The morning a fter a big party on Aloha Way at West End Road, a trail of blood led from the offshoot street onto the main road, then stopped in a random location.
4:03 p.m. A man left a gym bag in his car on North Street. Soon he was pricing a new car window.
• Monday, February 11 4:43 a.m. After breaking the front window of a recreation store and trying to make off with a well-secured display bicyle, the alleged perp was found a block away and arrested.
3:57 p.m. A man out back of a Valley West shopping center may have been drunk and aggressive toward customers, but at least he peed on the dumpster.
• Tuesday, February 12 2:19 p.m. Someone cut a hole in the fence at the U.S. Fish & Wildlife building on Heindon Road, apparently trying to steal a boat motor. The effort failed, but the burglar did manage to cut some fuel lines and steal gasoline.
4:10 p.m. People got used to parking in the fire lane by a mobile home park’s office, and warnings didn’t help. APD went and cited seven vehicles, and boy oh boy, did they not like that.
• Wednesday, February 13 12:47 a.m. A man allowed an aged traveler to take a shower in his seedy Valley West motel room, and, he said, the geezer stole his “blue book,” credit cards, cash and his girlfriend’s jewelry.
5:51 p.m. A low-budget super anti-hero had cobbled together an outfit consisting of a red hoodie, army-syle green cloak and a mohawk ’do. But his only superpower was peeing in some bushes by an F Street pizza parlor, and he wasn’t very good at that. An attempt to multitask by arguing with passersby sealed the fail, and he agreed to move along.
7 p.m. It was hard to tell whether his sweatshirt was green or gray, and as for the contents of the plastic bag he was clutching, best not ask. Not that asking him to leave had much effect at an H Street movie theatre – until 911 was called. He next turned up at a nearby deli, and was arrested on a public drunkenness charge.
7:34 p.m. A fun-loving man and woman enjoyed horseplay at Seventh and G streets. No equines were involved, but the merriment did include one of the two lying on the ground near a shoe store.
• Thursday, February 14 6:38 a.m. A briefcase left in plain sight in a car parked on lower H Street departed amid the usual spray of granulated safety glass.
1:01 p.m. A woman listed her truck for sale on Craigslist, and met up with a man who responded. She let him take the truck to a mechanic for inspection, and he never came back. Her bank account didn’t show any payment money deposited, and shen she called him, he became silent and hung up. She guessed that he was en route to Colorado.
• Friday, February 15 7:49 p.m. A fishing pole and waders left in a vehicle on Chester Avenue were stolen by a possible outdoorsy-tove.
8:56 a.m. A video camera left in a Villa Way car left via a smashed window.
9:03 p.m. A woman at the ER was neither drunk nor crazy, and had been running naked on Clam Beach for some other reason. The Sheriff’s Office brought her in for the evaluation, and her husband and their vehicle were still out there.
10:12 p.m. The men in a Valley West motel room were drinking, smoking dope and yukking it up with an intensity available only to the truly oblivious. The rollicking rubes were immune to appeals by other lodgers to quieten down, so police went and cleared them out.
10:24 p.m. A man in a white jacket came to the front door of a Hidden Creek Road house, ostensibly to sell magazines at this hour. But his main interest was asking about the resident and her roommate, casting doubt on the whole magazine thing.
• Saturday, February 16 9:24 a.m. A woman used the stainless steel courtesy phone outside the police station to ask for specific officer and ramble incoherently about high-intensity LED streetlights.
1:52 p.m. A woman in a brown hoodie and green pants removed a hot tub cover from a J Street Finnish-style business and deposited on the sidewalk outside.
• Sunday, February 17 12:04 a.m. Two men, one in a red sweatshirt and another in a blue sweatshirt, collaborated in pissing on a California Avenue mailbox.
5:46 a.m. A man with the hoodie up over his head tried to enter a D Street apartment complex, but succeeded only in getting arrested on a public drunkenness charge.
9:59 a.m. A 12th Street car was ransacked and a cell phone stolen.
4:33 p.m. A car was stolen overnight from a G Street parking lot.
