Between March 30 and April 6, Ponoka RCMP members were like crime fighting dentists ... fighting off moral decay and rooting out lawless bacteria. The sum of all this brushing and flossing was to generally discourage cavities by making examples of those bits of crud which get stuck between your teeth. As a result, the equivalent of, 17 specks of parsley and 8 sesame seeds were lodged in cells this week.
A woman called 911 to report that an intoxicated man had followed her home from the bar after closing time. She had managed to get into her residence and lock her doors but wasn’t sure if that was going to adequately discourage the liquor lubricated leach. Police attended and located a man passed out on the ground nearby. His pants were down around his ankles and there was a little pile of grass clippings neatly piled where - say a fig leaf would be placed, if he were a statue of Cupid and not just some drunken yahoo who passed out, mid-tinkle ... as was the case here. If it was his intention, that he not spend the night alone, he got his wish in the form of another warm body to share the floor of Tank One with. You know, two guys ‘spooning’ to keep warm after their plane crashes in the mountains is called “surviving”. When it happens in the drunk tank it’s called “cuddling”.
A man called police to report that his dear friend (who, by a strange coincidence had the same first and last name as him, only spelled slightly different ) had locked himself in his host’s bathroom and was going to ‘end it all’. Police attended and discovered that both the complainant and the subject of the complaint were (as they had, in fact, actually already suspected) the same man. They also discovered that the man had either ‘blinded’ himself or had ‘killed’ himself by ... mixing Gin and tomato/vegetable cocktail. In either event, the effects were temporary and he is fine now. Fine ... but Yuk! Such a mixture must have come with its own distinct set of consequences! (Author’s note: When I was a prison guard at the Edmonton Max, the inmates on one of the units made a brew of fermented ketchup. As intended, it became a potent spirit. What wasn’t intended for this batch of ketchup schnapps was the abundance of E Coli it also contained. Soon, the inmates began to vomit explosively, one after another. Soon they were barfing in four part harmony, partly because of the food poisoning, partly because of what they were seeing, hearing and more importantly, smelling all around them. Which gets me back to my original point: The smell. When I was told about this Gin and V8 story ... I could smell that cell block in the Max once again).
Somebody else that really enjoys jail life is the young man we keep getting reports about this week. He is allegedly going around sucker punching people for no appreciable reason. We know of three such people who this pusillanimous pugilist has punched without provocation. He has spent a fair amount of time in jail over the last year or so and not surprisingly for offences of the type, which I tend to chronicle in this blotter. It would seem (absent some other reasonable explanation) that he would like to go back to jail. I’m not sure why though ... I doubt it’s the food; as I mentioned earlier ... good quality liquor is hard to come by. Maybe it’s hard to find someone to play ‘plane crash on the mountain / survivor’ with? Police would like anyone with similar complaints to come forward. After that ... we’ll ask him ‘why’.
It takes a certain degree of stupidity to steal items from a convenience store, which has an excellent video surveillance system. More so, if the large screen of the surveillance monitor is one of the first things you see when you walk into the store. It is almost inconceivable that one would steal something like a charity coin container from such a place, especially if that coin container was practically in the center of the picture on the high definition monitor. Still, one such person was charged with this very offence a week ago. He was easily recognized by the first member who viewed the surveillance tape. That said, you would have to be exponentially more stupid to do it again at the very same place ... yet he did. Now don’t get me wrong here; I’ve done some amazingly stupid things in my time too. As a child, I once plugged a carpet staple into a live electrical outlet ... once. The operative term, here though, is “once”.
If you have information about any unsolved crime or ongoing criminal enterprise, call the Ponoka RCMP at 783-4472. You can also call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS or now leave tips anonymously on-line at www.tipsubmit.com . If this is the kind of environment that you would like to work in, we are hiring. Check us out at www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca or call 1-877-RCMP-GRC for information about the application process.