Arcata Police Log: Schrödinger’s Cat Makes Appearance In Driveway, And Doesn’t
• Tuesday, April 15 9:57 a.m. The rugged individualist who lives in a bus outside a Sunny Brae church has a big dog which is often unleashed and is generating complaints.
• Wednesday, April 17 10:31 a.m. A Community Forest user found dog treats in a certain location, and was concerned that they may have been poisoned.
2:59 p.m. A man in a blue suitcoat and bright red pants laid down a on a comforter on the sidewalk at Fifth and F streets, a prime spot from which to yell at passersby.
9:43 p.m. After swerving into a median on Alliance Road, a driver’s tire “popped.” After a stop at the hospital, the driver was jailed for alleged drunkenness.
• Thursday, April 18 12:45 a.m. A frequent 911 caller on lower H Street reported neighbors stacking pallets between his and their house, and crafting a bomb for placement in his home. On arrival, the man said he was having a stroke, and that’s why he was upset when he called. He was deemed demented and his complaints insubstantial.
10:57 a.m. The panhandling signholders at Samoa Boulevard and H Street were reported pressing the crosswalk button to activate the traffic signal. They were counseled.
11:33 a.m. Three dogs – one white, one black and one a red and brown pit bull – charged a woman in Shay Park, leaving her shaken.
8:32 p.m. A man with a mustache and beard that were “shaved in the middle” entered a J Street business and talked about how he doesn’t want to “allow” bosses, and that small business people should be shot in the back of the head. He wandered off and wasn’t found.
9:33 p.m. A purple-hoodied man wandered the halls in a downtown hotel, eventually lying down on the third floor. He was arrested on a drunkenness charge.
• Friday, April 19 8:11 a.m. A clothesless man carried naught but a guitar near 11th Street and Lewis Avenue. He was ambulanced to the nervous hospital.
2:15 p.m. Alliance Road residents leave a dog named Moonshadow in a car for days at a time, and their two starving cats, Lettie and Smokey, are locked out of the apartment.
3:08 p.m. A quantum mechanics demonstration took place in a Diamond Drive driveway, where someone left a box with a note that said, “I’m sorry I killed your cat.” But the resident doesn’t own a cat, and didn’t know what was in the box. We must assume the box both contained and didn’t contain a catdaver until Mr. Schrödinger or his unwitting designee checks in on it, at which point the universe will fork off yet again.
• Saturday, April 20 5:58 p.m. Insolent youths were seen sauntering down Ariel Way, carrying a “SPEED HUMP” sign. It was located in a nearby park.
• Sunday, April 21 1:41 a.m. A booze-besotted man was scraped out of a Baldwin Avenue front yard and ambulanced away.
7:10 a.m. A motorcycle disappeared from a Baldwin Avenue house sometime in the previous two weeks. The owner had left the key in the ignition while working on it.
12:14 p.m. An Ariel Way resident had hired a moving company to transport his property from New Jersey to Arcata. It was supposed to have arrived two weeks previous, but didn’t. The moving company had no information about the whereabouts of his stuff.
1:05 p.m. Someone found a snake on 10th Street, and after briefly and pointlessly incarcerating it in a box and notifying police, released it in a nearby field.
1:45 p.m. A man “thrashing” around on the ground at Seventh and K streets was going through opiate withdrawal, and was ambulanced away to the hospital.
2:29 p.m. A young lemonade stand operator on Janes Road was reported running back and forth Frogger-style across the street to the median and back.
5:09 p.m. When the traffic signal at Samoa Boulevard and K Street turned green, the first car stopped there remained immobile. The driver behind it honked his horn, which set the first driver off on a road rage-fueled escapade. He pulled over, honking and rigid-digitizing the honker, then followed the person to Humboldt State.
• Monday, April 22 12:33 p.m. A man in a wheelchair and covered in feces refused to get off the transit bus. By the time he was extricated, an ambulance was there to take him away.
2:17 p.m. A topless female was confronted by police about indecent exposure. A re-shirting was hastily arranged.
2:30 p.m. Nostalgic Arcata High Alumni relived his glory days by spinning donuts in the gym parking lot during school hours.
2:36 p.m.
Who sings too long
Who treats you wrong?
Baby it’s the guitar man
Who can’t you stop
Outside your shop?
Baby it’s the guitar man
He can make you mad, he can make you cry
He will bring you down, but he’s probably high
Cops then kept him going –
somewhere called “away”
To find another place to play…
3:34 p.m. A security keeper of the peace was suspected of injuring a patron’s left pinky. The damages include a torn tendon and an inability to henceforth consume tea like a true and dainty gentleman.
4:21 p.m. When a suspect on F Street offered his victim the choice of relieving him of an iPod or having his face smashed in, the victim picked off-menu option no. 3: to call the cops. The goateed robbery suspect was tracked down a few blocks away and arrested.
7:03 p.m. An unfortunate encounter with a rice cooker left a man with burns on his face and neck.
• Tuesday, April 23 9:34 a.m. “If I had a gun, I would use it,” said a Valley West woman. She told an officer that she is in chronic pain and would never really shoot herself. It was explained to her that statements like that are rather inadvisable, but she said she’s been saying that for years.
11:39 a.m. After a student brought bullets and a hand grenade to school on Spear Avenue, another student brought a switchblade knife the next day. The teacher didn’t suspect them, but told their parents of the unacceptable weaponry.
11:48 a.m. A college-age woman in a new jogging suit stole a “vintage shopping cart” from a Sunny Brae store, but lost interest in the item, abandoning it at Bayside Road and Union Street. It was retrieved.
11:56 a.m. Two blokes broke into fisticuffs at the Veterans’ Park at Eighth and F streets. Or they “may have been taking out their aggression on two large shrubs that were severely broken.”
6:25 p.m. A group of young men were seen throwing water balloons off a roof at moving vehicles in the 800 block of I Street. The police scolded the 20-year-olds and warned them that continued splattings would result in a timeout.
• Wednesday, April 24 1:29 p.m. On the floor of a 13th Street supermarket of choice, $140 was found. The store was alerted that while the two $20 bills were real, the $100 bill was phony-baloney funny money.
5:51 p.m. An officer was hailed at the Community Center by a woman who had been approached by a man who said he needed help with a “groin injury.” But before the officer could address the crotch crisis, the woman left, as did the groin whisperer.
7:56 p.m. A woman gave her old cell phone to an ex-boyfriend, who then traded it in on a new phone in her name. Apparently a confrontation ensued, with the offending gadget consigned to the kitchen trash receptacle. But the former boyf somehow retrieved it from the garbage, and this led to a hemorrhage in whatever vestigial trust she may have had in this trash-dipping cell phone trader-inner.
9:08 p.m. A woman who is drinking while breastfeeding was heard arguing with her boyfriend, possibly over pass-through beverages.
11:40 p.m. Neighbors used to threaten each other personally, or at least pound on the ceiling with a broomstick to antagonize the upstairs resident. Now they lazily send violent text threats between apartments, and something special has been lost.
• Thursday, April 25 4:32 a.m. A neighbor’s call to the authorities led to a warning being issued to a household playing techno music two doors down. The complaint wasn’t necessarily due to the volume but rather to their terrible taste in broadcasting a robotic drone all over the ’hood.
7:40 a.m. A duffel bag of cosmetology items was stolen out of an unlocked vehicle, gravely setting back one person’s study of the cosmos.
2:31 p.m. A McCallum Circle man – someone’s boyfriend, for some reason – went door to door begging for rides and cigarettes in an impressive display of parasitism and dependency.
3:15 p.m. An armed man entered a 10th Street apartment, using a gun to rob a woman of her purse. A chase ensued, the purse was recovered and the perp escaped.
