A Runner

Monday another officer and were dispatched to suspicious activity at a vacant residence. Dispatch told us that the front door had been kicked in and there was a car parked behind the residence.

We arrived and my partner walked up to the front door. It was not kicked in. He knocked on the door but got no answer. We then walked around the residence and saw the car in back. The keys were in the ignition. From looking in the windows we could see that the residence was not being lived in.

We continued around the residence and found a window was slightly open in the front. My partner opened the curtain and looked in. He immediately smelled the odor of burning marijuana and saw a male and female having sex on a dirty mattress with no sheets. My partner told them to come to the door. They said they needed to get dressed and would come to the door. My partner called for another officer to assist.

I walked to the back of the house to make sure no one tried to get out that way and my partner went to the front. I saw the woman walk towards the front door and went around to the side so I could tell my partner she was coming.

As I turned to go back to the back I saw a male take off running across the back yard and through a hole in a wooden fence. I yelled at him to stop but he kept running with me behind him.

He made it through the hole in the fence and I lost sight of him. When I got through the fence I did not see him anymore. I was in a backyard and there were two males there. I asked them where he had gone and they told me around front. So I ran that way and did not see anything, he had just disappeared. By this time my partner had made it to where I was and we began to check the area.

Another officer arrived in the area and went to the original residence. The woman was not there. As my partner and I continued to check the area the officer at the residence told us that a resident from a neighboring house had come to him and said a woman had just barged into their house and was hiding there. That officer went to the house and detained the woman.
By this time my partner and I had returned to the residence. A computer check showed the female was wanted so she was placed under arrest for the warrants as well as criminal trespass for just barging into the neighbor’s house.

We called for a dog from a neighboring agency. When the dog arrived we started to retrace my route. As we got to the hole in the fence a woman met us and told us there was a "black guy" in her house. This was a white woman and it happened that the guy that ran was black.
My partner and I along with the dog and his handler went to the house. We were told the guy was in the garage. After yelling at him repeatedly and threatening to send the dog in he came out.

Once he was in custody he told me he was on parole and had a parole violation and that was why he had run. It turned out he was on parole for aggravated assault on a peace officer for trying to run over an officer a couple of years ago. He also had a warrant for possession of a controlled substance as well as various traffic warrants.

One of the males from the backyard went to jail for hindering apprehension. The guy was a friend of his and he had hidden him in the house and lied about it.

Aggravated Assault

Sunday I was dispatched to a wreck where there had been an assault. When I got there I talked to a man that told me he was sitting in his truck in the backyard to a house. His ex-girlfriend showed up and wanted money. They got into an argument and she reached in and scratched his face several times. I could see the scratches and that he was bleeding.

The man went on to say that while he was sitting in the truck his ex-girlfriend rammed the truck four times, and then she left. The evidence I saw seemed to match his story, plus he had a witness that gave the same account.

The ex-girlfriend was not on scene, but the man told us where she lived. Another officer went to her house as I conducted my investigation. He found that the ex-girlfriend was not home but someone at the house called her and she said she would return.

I finished my investigation at the offense location and went to the suspect’s house. A short time later the ex-girlfriend drove up. She had damage to the front of her Jeep Cherokee.

I spoke with her using an interpreter. She told me that she had gone to the offense location to get some money and got into an argument with her boyfriend. During the argument he said he was going to kill her and grabbed her to prevent her from leaving. She got away and he blocked her in with his truck so she rammed the truck to get away.

The ex-girlfriend showed me one scratch on her wrist to back up her story. Her story was not consistent with what I had seen at the offense location. The truck that got rammed was sitting in the back corner of the yard and was not blocking anyone from leaving. I could see the marks in the dirt where the truck had been pushed after being hit so I was certain that is where it had been parked when it had been rammed.

I told the ex-girlfriend I did not believe her story and arrested her for aggravated assault with a motor vehicle, my second felony arrest of the week.

The Name Game

The other day I was working S.T.E.P., which is traffic enforcement and is overtime (woohooo). While riding around looking for traffic violations I saw a man run a stop sign in right in front of me. In fact he looked right at me and ran the stop sign while turning right.

I followed him and stopped him as he pulled in a parking lot. I made contact with him and asked him for his license. He said he did not have it so I asked him his name and birth date. He gave me a name and birth date. I asked him how old he was and the age did not match with his birth date. Being a seasoned officer this made me think he was lying to me.

I returned to my car and had dispatch check him for warrants under the name and date of birth he gave me. While I was doing this a female walked up and started to talk to the driver. Police officers do not like this and I told her to come to me. Then I asked her her friend’s name. She game me a different name than he had.

I had dispatch check the name the girl had given me and found that we had dealt with him before, and that he had a traffic warrant. I then went up to the driver and called him by the name the girl had given me. He answered by that name. I asked him why he was answering to the name I called him if his name was the name he had given me.

I then had him get out of his car and arrested him for his warrant as well as fail to identify-fugitive since he was wanted. Both of those are misdemeanors. It turned out the name and birth date he had originally given me were his brothers. That made his lying to me another offense, fraudulent use of identifying information, which is a felony. When I told him this he was not very happy. He went from possibly going to jail for a traffic warrant to having two additional charges including a felony.