This Sucks: An altercation over a vacuuming job reached the point of police involvement at a local garage. A car owner was having some routine maintenance done on his car and asked for it to be vacuumed after it had been serviced. The car owner claims that when his car received a shoddy vacuuming by an employee of the garage, he instructed the employee to vacuum it out again as “the job wasn’t done right the first time.” According to the car owner, this comment caused the employee to become angry and he (the employee) “displayed a metal pipe” at the other man. The employee’s story is slightly different. He agrees that the car owner commented on the vacuuming job by saying, “Hey, boy, you didn’t vacuum this car out right,” but he says that he never displayed any metal pipe toward the other man but simply told him to get off the property.
Wasted Efforts:A jeep owner feared the worst when he discovered that his vehicle had been broken into. Someone managed to enter the jeep and damage the center console and glove compartment, obviously in an attempt to find and steal anything of value. Much to this tampering thief’s dismay, all he could find worth taking were several maintenance records valued at a whopping $1; not really worth the effort, was it?
Who Is This Guy?: Upon answering a knock on his front door, one man was in for quite a shock. Several armed men were waiting when the door opened and they instructed the man not to move and aimed a gun at him. Here’s where it gets weird: Instead of following the armed men’s instructions, the brazen man decided to “close the door in the suspects face [sic].” This gutsy move apparently instilled some fear into these gun-wielding crooks and caused them to flee on foot toward a nearby school, where a car was waiting for a speedy escape.
What’s All The Hubbub?: While parked in an apartment complex parking lot, one woman’s car underwent some unwanted alterations. Sometime during the night, someone in search of a spare hubcap settled for stealing one from this woman’s car. Although only the passenger side hubcap was missing, it seems our thief got greedy and pried a second hubcap off but for some reason left it lying next to the car.
Those Meddling Kids: A woman’s house was broken into last week and several items turned up missing. Among the stolen goods: several articles of clothing (including pajamas), bath products, bottles of perfume, and a few toys, including a toy dinosaur, motorcycle and trucks. The refrigerator was even ransacked and was missing some yogurt and Halloween candy. The missing items clearly indicated that the thieves were kids and, sure enough, three juveniles were arrested shortly thereafter.
Tire-d Of This: A couple became involved in a verbal dispute at a motel when the girlfriend suspected her boyfriend of seeing another woman. After discovering his infidelity, the girlfriend started screaming at the boyfriend and demanded to be reimbursed for the motel room she just rented. Screaming didn’t seem to help, so the girlfriend took out a knife and sliced two of the tires on his car. The boyfriend later had his car towed to a friend’s house after leaving the girlfriend to deal with her issues. The girlfriend wasn’t done though, and in the wee hours of the night showed up at the friend’s house and went at those tires again. This time, she cut the other two tires and then went to work on the friend’s car.
Marked Territory: When you see a stranger standing by your car, you tend to want to investigate. That’s what one woman did when she noticed a man standing by her car parked in front of her home. When the man moved away, the woman immediately went to her car and was greeted with the unpleasant odor of urine. Yep, the man took a piss on the woman’s car door, zipped up, and then moved on.
Fire Starters: A bathroom almost went up in smoke last week at a local high school. Some students thought it might be interesting to set a trashcan on fire and then see if anyone noticed. Well, one attentive teacher noticed and was able to douse the fire with water before it grew out of control.
Blotter items are chosen from the files of the Charlotte Police Department.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2002.
