Crime of the Century (Waste Case Division)

GREELEY, Colo., Sept. 15, 2010 - "If you're trying to escape from police, you might want to take a hint from Adam Segura, who learned an important lesson Thursday: Don't steal a police car, especially if you're drunk."
   This eminently reasonable advice appears in the lede of an non-bylined Sept. 11 story posted on the Web site of the Greeley Tribune, the newspaper of record in Greeley, Colo., a township of 98,596 people located forty-nine miles north-northeast of Denver. (This according to Wikipedia, the site containing the scribblings both of fact-loving obsessives and of, well, liars. The population figure comes from 2006 Census Bureau estimates, so we can assume it is correct. Then again, it appears on Wikipedia, so who knows?)
   It all began last Thursday at one in the afternoon, as so many things do. A Greeley police officer with the likably anonymous name of Craig Miller stopped Mr. Segura, who is thirty-two, for allegedly driving 62 mph in a 55 mph zone. In chatting with Mr. Segura, Officer Miller, as the mysterious Tribune reporter puts it, "noticed signs of drinking including glassy eyes, an odor of alcohol on [Mr.] Segura's breath and slurred speech."
   While these symptoms may indicate drinking to excess, they also could be the result of a love-partner conversation gone wrong. After one of those, any sane man would want to hit the road for a bit and might presently find himself driving as fast as he is thinking. So it's difficult to say whether Mr. Segura was, in fact, drunk, because... oh, wait.
   "'The defendant [Mr. Segura] also admitted to officer Miller that he'd drank alcochol,' according to [an] affadavit," according to the Tribune. Is it nitpicky to point out that the affadavit should read, "admitted to officer Miller that he'd drunk alcohol"? (Emphasis mine.) Perhaps so; often, officers of the law are simply too busy, what with catching criminals and so forth, to toy with the niceties of correct grammar.
   Officer Miller quite sensibly handcuffed Mr. Segura's hands behind his back, and then placed him in the back seat of an unmarked police car. He then buckled Mr. Segura's seat belt. (Safety first, even for miscreants.)

   Mr. Segura, showing the ingenuity that often, oddly, is the hallmark of those in the grip of an alcoholic blackout, managed to maneuver his hands, still locked in the handcuffs, around in front of him. He unbuckled the seat belt and climbed into the front seat of the car, unobserved by Officer Miller, who was busy chatting with (or, in police parlance, "questioning") a woman in Mr. Segura's car.
   To the no doubt great surprise of Officer Miller, a backup officer, and possibly the woman in Mr. Segura's vehicle and Mr. Segura himself, Mr. Segura zoomed off in the cop car. Officers chased him down U.S. 34 for roughly a mile, at which point Mr. Segura inexplicably stopped.
   The Tribune neglects to say whether Mr. Segura activated the car's siren, which would have been, like, totally awesome. The Trib does report that Mr. Segura was stopped near the entrance to the Greeley Mall, so it is possible that Mr. Segura had more important things on his pickled brain than blasting sirens, such as stopping at Hot Topic and buying his girlfriend a Tartan skirt and a skull-embossed black t-shirt.
   Mr. Segura is now in the Weld County jail and faces no fewer than twelve charges, which really kind of puts him in the drunken-police-car-stealing hall of fame. Charges include aggravated motor vehicle theft, escape, vehicular eluding (a lovely locution), speeding, no proof of insurance, resisting arrest, obstruction of a police officer, two counts of driving under the influence (he blew a .26, three times the legal limit), and three counts of being a habitual traffic offender.
   This last suggests that this is not the first time Mr. Segura has engaged in vehicular shenanigans (including eluding?). Some people simply aren't meant to drink; others aren't meant to drive; still others aren't meant to drink and drive, lest they wind up in the clink with the book t'rown at 'em.

Crime of the Century (Parking is Hard to Find Division)

LOVELAND, Colo., March 12 - Richard Albers, who is eighty-five, evidently is a man of consistent habits. 
   Nearly every morning for sixteen years, Mr. Albers parked in a particular spot in the lot of the McDonald's in Loveland, Colo. (pop. roughly 55,000). Although news reports don't specify, it is fair to assume that, after parking and likely locking his vehicle, Mr. Albers would walk into the restaurant and avail himself of the many delectable delights on display. 
   Sometime in 2008, or perhaps earlier, this bucolic, not to say halcyon, existence was shattered when a man named Vernon Brandt, who is now fifty-one, parked in the spot Mr. Albers had, as do so many people, come to think of as his own. 
   This began to happen with increasing frequency, and Messrs. Brandt and Albers apparently had words, over time, about this, well, travesty. 
  It all came to a head on July 29,2008, when Mr. Brandt parked his truck and trailer in a way that, intentionally or not, blocked what can only by this point be called the Albers spot. 
   Mr. Albers, arriving for his customary, oh, maybe a Happy Meal, or a simple milkshake (with, on his more sinful days, a side of fries?), couldn't help but notice that, once again, Mr. Brandt had prevented him from parking in the place where he, Mr. Albers, felt happiest. 
   Well, life is full of sorrow and a man's pleasures are few. So it makes sense that, perhaps swearing under his breath (news reports are vague), Mr. Albers climbed down from his sport utility vehicle, walked over to Mr. Brandt's truck and tapped on the driver's side window in order, presumably, to initiate a conversation. 
   Mr. Brandt, who later claimed he was startled, opened the driver's door with terrific force. It toppled Mr. Albers, who, at the time, remember, was roughly eighty-three years old, more than thirty years older than Mr. Brandt. 
  A witness at Mr. Brandt's recent trial for third-degree assault testified that Mr. Brandt then grabbed Mr. Albers, cocked his fist, and said (growled? shouted? hissed? Details are sketchy), "You want to fight, you son of a bitch?" 
   The Ft. Collins Coloradan reported on March 7 that it took a jury less than three hours to convict Mr. Brandt, a local contractor, of a single charge of third-degree assault. 
   Whatever his transgressions, Mr. Brandt should be lauded for selecting, in defense attorney Tony Krenning, a creative lawyer not averse to engaging in a little bit of creative lawyering. 
   During the trial, Krenning told the jury that Mr. Albers' tapping scared Mr. Brandt, who merely opened his door quickly to escape. Mr. Krenning added that the testimony about the threat (you know, the "you son of a bitch" comment) was merely "salt and pepper" added by the witness.
   "It didn't happen," Mr. Krenning told the jury, referring to the contretemps between Messrs. Brandt and Albers (you know, the fist cocking, and etcetera), "but it makes a good story now." 
   And then Mr. Krenning waxed philosophic: "It's so incredible because we're talking about a parking space. At a doggone McDonald's. It's tragic." 
   Too true. Too, too true. 
   Well, wait. No. The Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, young lives cut short on the fields of battle - those are tragedies. A parking lot quarrel? That's more of a quandary. 
   On the stand, Mr. Brandt claimed he didn't know whether the window tapper was, as ace Coloradan reporter Trevor Hughes wrote, "a 9-year-old child or a man with a gun outside." 
   Upon hearing that, prosecutor Greg Biggers may have chuckled a little; Hughes's report didn't say. We do know, however, that Biggs, referring to Brandt, said to the jury, "His own words: 'Could have been a 9-year-old.' That's reckless, folks." 
   One is hardly a legal expert, but it seems reasonable to assume that, more than anything else, that folksy "folks" absolutely sealed the case for the prosecution. People who are just plain folks, and proud of it, like to have their proud plain folks-ness recognized and affirmed, and any prosecutor worth his salt knows this in the marrow of his bones. 
   Mr. Brandt will be sentenced next month. He faces up to two years in jail or prison. (The Coloradan, coyly, didn't specify which. Hughes, the reporter, only used the phrase "behind bars," which, technically, could mean Mr. Brandt might spend up to twenty-four months out back of a few saloons.)
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