Clearly a Poor Disguise
In a perhaps unintentional bid for the worst criminal disguise of 2018, Kerry Hammond Jr., 22, broke into a GameStop store in St. Marys, Ga., at 1:19 a.m. on Friday, April 13, where he was captured on camera wearing a clear plastic wrapper (of the sort that holds bundles of bottled water together) over his head. Not surprisingly, WJXT reported, Hammond’s face was clearly visible in the surveillance video; local police quickly identified and captured him on Tuesday, April 17. Hammond, incidentally, already had two active felony warrants for his arrest for burglary and second-degree criminal damage to property.
The Russ-ians Are Coming!
In Oslo, Norway, according to Reuters, tradition calls for recent high school graduates to participate in something known as a Russ—a several-weeks-long party that includes drinking, nudity and public sex—sometimes results in injury-causing or even fatal car crashes by distracted drivers. So this year, the Public Roads Administration issued a statement on Wednesday, April 18, headlined: “No to Sex on Roundabouts!” It warns that Russ participants should refrain from running naked and having sex on bridges and roundabouts because such behavior can give vehicle drivers “too much of a surprise.”
The Fajita Felon
Over the last two years, Cameron County employee Gilberto Escamilla, 53, of Brownsville, Texas, has been accepting shipments of fajitas worth a total of $1.2 million at the Darrell B. Hester Juvenile Detention Center. But inmates there aren’t served fajitas. Escamilla had been ordering shipments of fajitas from Labatt Food Service in Harlingen and then reselling them online for profit. “It started small and got bigger and out of control,” Escamilla told the court, according to The Brownsville Herald. On Friday, April 20, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to theft by a public servant.
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Oops!
The Washington State Department of Transportation had to issue a mea culpa on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 17, after an electronic highway sign displayed the message “U SUCK” above Interstate Five near Jovita, Wash. WSDOT called the sign “an inappropriate message that appeared due to a training error” and was “clearly a mistake,” according to KCPQ TV.
Least Competent (and/or Weird) Criminals
• Timothy Hill, 67, of Grassington, North Yorkshire, England, having installed a laser jammer in his Range Rover, thought he was outsmarting law enforcement speed cameras. In fact, he was so sure of his scheme that he repeatedly raised his middle finger to the cameras as he passed them by at speed. What he didn’t realize was that the laser jammer, rather than hiding his identity, was only blocking police from determining his speed, so when they tracked him down, he was charged: not with speeding, but with “perverting the course of justice.” “If you want to attract our attention, repeatedly gesturing at police cameras with your middle finger while you’re driving a distinctive car fitted with a laser jammer is an excellent way to do it,” Traffic Constable Andrew Forth told Metro News. Hill pleaded guilty on Monday, April 23, and was sentenced to eight months in jail and prohibited from driving for a year.
• Kiana Wallace, 24, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in Belmont County, Ohio, on Monday, April 23, following her guilty plea for tampering with evidence. On probation after a drug possession sentence in 2017, Wallace failed a drug urine test when the “borrowed” sample she used tested positive for drugs. “Let me get this straight,” Judge Frank Fregiato said in court, according to WTOV-TV. “To avoid the positive test with your own urine, you used someone else’s urine, which turned out to be positive also?” Indeed, that was positively the case.
• On Monday, April 23, police officers in Warren, Mich., responded to a home for a welfare check on 68-year-old George Curtis, whose relatives had become concerned because they hadn’t heard from him in some time. Curtis was, indeed, dead. In fact, WJBK-TV reported, he had been deceased for as much as a year. Also found in the home: his girlfriend, who had continued living there with Curtis’ decaying body, which was found lying in their bed. Police transported the unnamed woman to a hospital for a mental evaluation.
• On the South Side of Chicago, police responded to reports of an elderly woman pushing a dead body around the Chatham neighborhood in a shopping cart on Saturday, April 21, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Officers took the woman to a hospital for a mental evaluation and launched an investigation into the female body, whose age and identity had not been determined at press time.
