LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMPOut: Crime and Punishment |
by Fay Jacobs |
By now, those of you who pass my house regularly on the evacuation route out of town may have noticed we added a garage. The construction wasn't without its adventures, but the final result is great. Especially for the blizzard of '03.
But while having a garage to house two cars plus an assortment of tools, holiday ornaments and schmutz has its good points, there's been at least one drawback. My friends keep accosting me with the rant, "You are NEVER home! Where have you been? We keep driving by and there's NEVER anybody there!" Okay, pals, think about it. We are not skiing in Aspen; not out every night slurping Cosmos; and certainly not wintering in the tropics. We simply parked the chariots in the garage. Duh. I can't tell you how many otherwise intelligent people didn't connect those dots. That being said, we did sneak off to Florida for a week in February and had a grand time visiting friends and family. Amid lots of vacation fun came a story that's too good to keep to myself. My friend Ronni and I have known each other since the days when anti-war activists took to the streets and...hmmm. Okay, that time 30 years ago. Unlike me, Ronni has a passion for exercise. Having been an enthusiastic but not particularly fast marathon runner, she always joked that her autobiography should be called "I finished ahead of the clean-up truck." Now that we're older, and new generations of students are out running and protesting, Ronni has traded marathons for brisk dog walking. Last month when we visited her in Ft. Lauderdale, she set out early one morning to take her Jack Russell terrier Rufus for a morning jog. After quite a long time, she and Rufus returned, the both of them looking rather shell shocked. "What happened?" I asked. "Well, we were coming back from our walk, when I saw this guy on the beach and he started running toward us. I couldn't figure out what he was doing, and next thing I knew he came up to us, ripped my fanny pack right off me and jumped into a waiting car." She was giving me this horrid news, but seemed oddly bemused. Shock, I thought. "Oh my god!" I said, "you could have been hurt, and he stole your purse, omigod!!!!" "Think about it, Fay," said Ronni, "we were coming back from our walk. I'm a responsible citizen, what do you think was in the fanny pack?" "He stole a bag of dog poop?" She started to laugh. "Exactly. There was a ziplock bag full of it," Ronni says. Now I'm laughing like a lunatic. "Wait, there's more. I was standing there, wondering what to do, when this car comes up and a man leans out the window saying 'Lady, you just had your purse stolen, right? Well, I saw the guy get into the car and I chased him.'" "I think 'oh, no,'" says Ronni "But he got away," says the stranger. "I think 'oh, good,' " says Ronni The stranger says "But don't worry, I called the police and reported it." Ronni tells me she thanked the guy and sent him on his way. From there, Ronni and Rufus walked back to their condo. Rounding the corner, Ronni sees a whole squad of police cars converged up the street and figures something awful has happened. "Excuse me," she says to a female officer, "I don't want to bother you, but I wanted to report that my fanny pack was just stolen." With a look of relief and then glee, the officer shouts to her colleagues, "We got the victim!!!" "We're really glad we found you," the officer explains, "because we caught the guy and recovered your purse. Now can you identify the contents of the purse?" I'm sure glad the question wasn't mine to answer. "Um, er... three keys....," says Ronni. "Yup, the keys were there. Anything else?" Ronni tries to gauge whether the officer is putting her on. No, she seems serious. "Well, there was a plastic bag with....," Ronni looks down at Rufus and up at the officer "dog poop." The officer starts to laugh, barely being able to spit out, "No, we didn't recover any dog poop." Both victim and cop picture the hapless thief inspecting his booty and dumping the offending package in disgust. "Talk about having a bad day," the officer says, looking at the police car where the poop snatcher sat, sullen and handcuffed. "You are going to press charges, aren't you?" she asks Ronni. "Since we went to a lot of trouble to catch him and besides, this was a serious crime, you could have been hurt." The upshot was that Ronni had to go over and I.D. the guy and fill out a report telling the whole truth and nothing but. A couple of days later, Ronnie found out that the hapless poop perp had already been arrested once for a drug offense. He was about to be put under house arrest for the doody heist and with the state having a three strikes law, it was only a matter of time before he broke out to score again. The judge figures he'll wind up doing fifteen to life for stealing a bag of shit. Talk about Les Miserable. Jean Valjean may have been arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, but nobody's writing an opera for this doofus. Can't you just picture him in the yard at the big house with his fellow inmates asking him what he's in for? And we thought we were tough on this sort of thing on the Rehoboth Boardwalk. In Florida, if you doo-doo the crime, you doo-doo the time. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 13, No. 3, April 4, 2003 |