Sometimes "true crime" means taking a grim, hard-jawed look into the heart of man's capacity for evil. Other times it means shooting a sideways glance at a bunch of bozos who needed to take a class at the Y before they could tie their own shoes. Today, we're doing the second kind of look right at these suckers ...
Quincy Green was arrested for carrying an unlicensed pistol, and pending trial, he had a tracking bracelet attached to his leg. So how did a witness place him at the scene of a murder a mile away from his apartment, while that tracker claimed he'd been there the whole time? How could Green possibly fool such a secure device? Was he a skilled hacker? Was this an evil twin scenario? An evil time-traveling twin scenario? Nope, he just took off his prosthetic leg -- you know, the same one some idiot attached the tracker to -- and replaced it with a backup.
plpchirawong/Adobe StockEvil afoot! Literally!
"We believe it was absolutely human error," said a representative of the tracking bracelet company in question. "Also, we are staffed by people who failed out of clown college" was only implied. Both the police and the victim's mother were baffled by the oversight. Hopefully the company instituted a "knock on the leg to see if it's real" policy afterward.
There are a few simple rules for stealing cars: Don't attract attention, don't drive it into a ditch, don't steal from anyone who looks like a Fast & Furious character, and don't bring your goddamn pet monkey along. Cody Blake Hesson broke at least two of those rules.
Hesson stole a car, as you do, but then drove it into a ditch, as you're not supposed to do. And when the sheriff's office showed up to arrest him, as they do, they found that he was accompanied by a monkey. An illegally owned monkey that had been dragged into the criminal underworld against its will -- or so it claimed.
Pasco County Sheriff's Office
Pasco County Sheriff's Office"The One Where Ross Needs Bail"
The monkey was sent to a primate sanctuary, while Hesson was charged with personal possession of wildlife without a permit and a violation of rules pertaining to captive wildlife in addition to the whole grand theft auto thing. And yet the greatest crime was that of the headline writer who wrote "Florida man arrested for driving stolen car. His friend wouldn't stop monkeying around" -- an offense for which no punishment would be too harsh.
This one doesn't need a lot of setup: Rye Wardlaw broke into an escape room, and irony ensued.
Wardlaw damaged the back doorknob to the point where it no longer functioned, then couldn't figure out the lock on the front door. This raises several questions, chief of which is how Wardlaw hadn't choked on a pretzel or something before that point. He then panicked and called 911, and being a crafty burglar who didn't want to spend a few minutes figuring out how a lock worked, he claimed his house was being robbed.
The worst part is that he finally managed to escape before police showed up, but was still in the vicinity and quickly apprehended. We guess the lesson is to try to stay calm and composed during your criminal acts, and also maybe don't call the police on yourself. And also don't break into rooms whose sole reason for existence is that they are difficult to break out of. There are a lot of lessons here.
We'll be the first to admit that alcohol has made us do stupid things, like try to teach a dog to rap or launch a comedy website on a dare and then have to maintain it for over a decade. So we sympathize with this young woman who, while attending a music festival in Minnesota, got her head stuck in a truck's tailpipe. USA Today gently suggested that "alcohol may have played a role." You know, possibly.
The woman was cited for underage drinking, and since it was a country music festival, the citation did note "no shit" at the bottom. In the end, the fire department had to cut the pipe off of the vehicle to extract the woman, which we're sure was a fun insurance claim for the truck's owner.
When five Florida teenagers were arrested for breaking into a house, authorities mostly wanted to know what had happened to an urn containing the ashes of the victim's father and her two Great Danes. Why all of their ashes were stored together is a discussion for another time.
aleoks/Adobe Stock"Look, a three-for-one coupon is a three-for-one coupon."
The burglars claimed they had mistaken the ashes for cocaine and tried to snort them, whereupon they determined that it was absolutely not cocaine. They then discussed returning the ashes, but remembered that their fingerprints were on the urn, and instead threw it all in a lake. To put it mildly, it is difficult to mistake cremated remains for cocaine, which suggests that the teens had either never previously done cocaine, or they had done way, way too much of it. Whatever the case, the event served as an important reminder: Always bring your own cocaine to a burglary.
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For more, check out The 7 Most Gloriously Stupid Crimes Ever Attempted and 6 Pointless Crimes That Required An Insane Amount Of Effort.
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Mark Hill
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