Paint the Town Throughout the first couple weeks of April, a bevy of reports started popping up regarding various drive-by shootings throughout the city; at least 10 incidents in the first 10 days of the month. The reason this is not quite as troubling as it sounds is that each of these incidents involved paintball guns as opposed to actual guns. A woman living on McLean Road in the Newell area reported that her house was hit 12 times. An east Charlotte man told police he saw a car back into his fence, and when he walked outside to confront the driver, multiple suspects inside the car opened fire on him with paintball guns. Things took a more serious turn in west Charlotte last week when a 2-year-old girl was pelted with nine paintballs in her front yard while her mother took groceries into the house. As of April 23, CMPD reportedly responded to 150 incidents involving paintball guns since January 1. I think it's about time we all masked up.
Move Yourself You should never ask someone you don't know very well to help you move, not only because it's a social faux pas, but because it could make you vulnerable to theft or even put you in danger, as happened recently to one man in east Charlotte. The victim told police he was moving into his new home in the Central Pointe Apartments and had enlisted the help of a man whom he did not know. Just after 3 p.m., the helper saw one of the victim's handguns and picked it up. Without warning, he pointed it at the victim and began shooting. The victim was not hit, but after he ran away, the suspect grabbed a Macbook, a pair of Gucci sunglasses and some jewelry then fled on foot, gun still in hand.
It's Not Fare Despite the recent opening of the light rail extension, CATS bus drivers are still going through the same old shit they have to deal with on a regular basis. One local driver filed a police report after being harassed and having his bus vandalized in east Charlotte last week. The driver told officers that the suspect jumped on the bus while it was sitting at a stop on Lawyers Road and began calling him derogatory names and shouting obscenities while multiple people were on the bus. The suspect never assaulted the driver, but instead punched the fare box, doing $2,074 in damage, according to the report. He then fled on foot.
Big Brother Employees at CATS were also involved in a non-criminal incident recently when they called police to report that they had found a camera recording on their property and then realized that nobody with the agency had put it there. The reporting person told police that they found a solar panel camera on CATS property near the Old Concord Road light rail station. Further investigation found that the camera did not, in fact, belong to CATS, but was placed there to help with a study on Blue Line trespassers being done by NC DOT and N.C. State University, making it only slightly less creepy.
The Hand That Helps You If you think bus drivers have it hard, please take a moment to think about the ER nurses in our city who sometimes put up with ridiculous harassment despite being there simply to help save lives. One 23-year-old nurse was the victim of an outrageous assault from a patient while working the graveyard shift at Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center in the Elizabeth neighborhood recently. The nurse told officers that she was working in the emergency room when a suspect waited for her to begin talking and then spit into her mouth. It's at that point that you just have to let the suspect suffer from whatever brought them into the ER in the first place, just on principle alone. Go find treatment elsewhere.
Good Grief It's never OK to leave your dog sitting inside a locked vehicle, but perhaps you'll be worse off if you leave it inside a running, unlocked vehicle. A 49-year-old man in Hidden Valley found this out the hard way when he thought he could run into a store quickly with no problem and lost his dog for it. The man told police that he left his Buick Rendezvous running in the driveway of a home that he ran into for seven to 10 minutes. That was all someone needed, apparently, because when he came back out it was gone. The worst part of the story is that the victim's Chihuahua, Charlie Brown, was in the back seat.
Delivery Denied On the day following the above-mentioned theft, a delivery driver went through a similar problem with his work vehicle just down the street. The man told police he went into a business on the corner of Sugar Creek Road and North Tryon Street to make a delivery for his employer, Innovative Courier Solutions. He told police he left the keys to the company's Ford Econoline van in the cupholder and went into the business for 20 minutes. When he came out, of course, the van was gone. This time, there was no pet in the back of the van, thank God, but there was something just as valuable to the driver. The only three items listed as stolen in the report were: "vehicle, Metro PCS cell phone and assorted drugs, to include narcotics."