SEPT. 17, 2:11 P.M.: Officers discovered a burglary at a senior recreation center in the 90 block of East Marks Street today. Applesauce and Alzheimer’s drugs, however, were left untouched.
The goods sought were atop the roof. A rather particular perp or perps mysteriously managed to climb to the top of the building and wasted no time in prying off “a large number of copper lightning rods, that were approximately one foot in length, from the roof of the complex,” police reports state. Let’s not think wiring connected to the rods went to waste, either – every bit was salvaged by the suspect(s), resulting in $5,000 worth of damage, reports add.
The following Saturday, shockingly, 20 grand worth of “copper lightning rod protection wire” was snatched off a surgery center’s roof in the 2000 block of North Orange Avenue, police reports further state.
Who would’ve guessed lightning-absorption gear was so desirable? Then again, it is made of copper, a material highly sought after by O-Town thieves.
SEPT. 17, 9:05 P.M.: Some suspects swipe lightning rods; others prefer heisting kiddie clothing at the mall.
A burglar, approximately 20 years old, perused the racks of children’s apparel at a department store in the 4200 block of Millenia Boulevard and selected four totally adorb garments. He paid for them, but scooted straight back to the rack thereafter. What happened next, some may say, is a truly magical act: Someone “saw the subject duck down behind the rack of clothing and, after a few seconds,” emerge with a bag that seemed “fuller than when he bent down,” police reports state.
The suspect considered now an excellent time to split. He made a mad dash toward the exit, but could not avoid interception when an officer snatched up the bag of wee T-shirts. The patrolman pointed out that our suspect had left something rather valuable behind: his 5-year-old son.
What good is an OshKosh B’Gosh shirt without a tyke to squeeze inside it? Although the suspect did recover his mini-me, his $267.12 bundle of purloined duds never made it out the door.
SEPT. 20, 2:41 P.M.: Watch your back, fellow Orlandoans. You might be in the presence of someone sneakily following your every footstep.
Let us use a 29-year-old woman with a yen for pricy electronics as our example. She’d simply swung by the mall in the 4200 block of Conroy Road to spend some green at a popular computer store. There she bought six Apple iPhones – worth $2,400 altogether – and headed back out to her parked Honda, likely eager to make all her gal pals jealous. But our iPhone femme had to march straight back to the store just moments after locking the arsenal of fashionable phones inside her trunk. She’d forgotten her receipt. D’oh!
The price of fetching the receipt turned out to be costly, and so not cool. Upon her return the woman found her driver’s-side window smashed and all her iPhones gone. And so we can conclude that the rest of her day sucked horribly.
SEPT. 23, 3:09 A.M.: Crashing your car into a police cruiser usually isn’t a great thing. Doing it while totally shitfaced drunk is far worse.
When a 29-year-old man smashed his Chevrolet against Officer Bishop’s parked patrol car near the intersection of East Colonial Drive and North Mills Avenue, naturally, she ran over to check on the driver. There he sat, weeping like a baby, the stench of hooch emanating from his person. She asked him to exit and follow her to the sidewalk. He did, stumbling and “swaying from side to side” in true plastered fashion with “red, bloodshot and watery eyes,” police reports state. He’d only had a couple of cold ones at the Parliament House Resort that night, he pleaded. Off to a lovely start.
Because a parked car translates into a moving vehicle in the mind of a tanked man, it’s easy to see how this fiasco began. “I take full responsibility, I had a lot to drink and I know I’m drunk,” police reports state the man told Bishop. But his slurred babbling didn’t stop there. He also thought he’d let her know that he is really supposed to wear glasses when driving “but does not because they make him self-conscious,” reports add.
The theatrics continued as our man suddenly clutched his left forearm and notified the officer that he had a cut and did not want her to catch anything. Rest assured, folks, the officer did not catch cooties. In fact, reports state, she identified the boo-boo as “a small scratch” and patched it up with a Band-Aid.
Arrest was unavoidable for drunky, however. It’s likely that the man’s refusal to perform a field sobriety test and the fact that he held his breath during most of the breathalyzer exam didn’t help matters.
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