An obscene gesture directed towards an officer in an unmarked vehicle led to a Safford woman being arrested on drug charges Friday, June 4.

An Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer arrested Barbara A. Hill, 21, on charges of possession of marijuana, possession of marijuana for sale, transportation of marijuana for sale, possession of a dangerous drug and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The arresting officer, DPS officer Lance Shupe, said he was getting ready to go home when the incident occurred.

“It’s hilarious,” Shupe said. “It was about 3:30. I was trying to go home. They totally brought it on themselves. I wasn’t even looking for them.”

The officer was driving west on Hwy. 70 from the San Jose area when he encountered the vehicle Hill was driving. He said he tried to pass the vehicle, but Hill would not let him.

“Then, when I passed her, then they decided to get right on me, and when I was turning into my office they honked the horn and gave me the one-finger salute,” Shupe said.

The officer made contact with Hill after she pulled her vehicle into the parking lot of the Circle K east of Safford, near the DPS office.

He said he smelled burned marijuana and conducted a search of the vehicle. He reportedly found three ounces of marijuana — some packaged for sale — a small quantity of methamphetamine and packing material for the meth and pipes.

Shupe said the only thing Hill said about the incident was that she was unaware he was an officer.

“So it’s OK to do it to the public, but if you’re a police officer, sorry,” Shupe said, laughing.

Other passengers in the vehicle with Hill were not arrested.

Because her license was suspended prior to this incident, it is possible she may face an additional charge of driving on a suspended license

Hill had her license suspended June 3, after being found guilty on charges of failure to provide proof of financial responsibility and speed greater than reasonable or prudent, from an incident on March 28.

Hill is also supposed to begin making payments June 28 for charges stemming from a March 8 incident, when she was charged with reckless driving, speed greater than reasonable or prudent, failure to provide proof of financial responsibility and failure to use her turn signal. She was found guilty on the charges, fined $385 and placed on unsupervised probation for one year.

Hill is also paying off the $475 fine she received June 12, 2003, for a May 1, 2003, failure to provide proof of financial responsibility citation.

Story courtesty of Greg Jones and Eastern Arizona Courier

A US Airways passenger slapped a federal air marshal after refusing to sit down and repeatedly ignoring orders to get off her cell phone, which she said would be “rude,” federal prosecutors charged Tuesday.

A public defender was appointed to represent Lilia Belkova, who will remain in jail pending a bail hearing Thursday.

Belkova was charged with assaulting a federal officer and interfering with a flight crew after her Miami-Philadelphia flight returned to the gate last Wednesday to drop her off.

The trouble started when she refused orders to turn off her phone while Flight 26 was taxiing for takeoff, saying: “It is rude to hang up on people. I don’t have to turn my phone off.”

A flight attendant told her that she would need to change her seat if she couldn’t follow instructions because she was sitting in an emergency exit row, which was open only to people who follow directions. She was sitting 11 rows ahead of her assigned seat.

Belkova, 38, responded that she was disabled and needed a wheelchair to reach the jet. The flight attendant said that was another reason for her to move because only people who could open the exit door were allowed to sit there.

Belkova said she could lift the 40-pound door and reached for the handle before other passengers yelled at her to stop.

The plane’s first officer was notified and decided Belkova needed to get off the plane. Heading back to the gate, she stood up, walked forward and was told to sit down.

One of two air marshals on the flight told Belkova she was interfering with the crew, told her to be seated and put a hand on her shoulder to show her where to sit.

Belkova reached back and slapped the marshal across the face, causing “minor swelling,” according to court papers filed by another marshal. Belkova was handcuffed and taken off the plane.

John L. Stanley, a convicted criminal who attempted to change his ways and became an author, radio host and consultant on crime prevention, was arrested Tuesday after police found him blocks away from a bank robbery, counting some of the $8,200 allegedly stolen.

The Dallas resident was being held today without bond and faces a detention hearing Thursday. His attorney could not be reached for comment.

Police investigating the robbery of a Commerce Bank branch in the Country Club Plaza shopping district said they found Stanley during a routine “area canvass” sitting in a car counting money.

Some of the money included traceable “bait” bills.

“For someone who is an expert on crime, or professes to be, he certainly made a lot of the mistakes he would advise others not to make,” said police spokesman Capt. Rich Lockhart.

The FBI said it believes Stanley drove to Kansas City from Dallas and considered several banks before choosing the Plaza branch.

Stanley said on his publishing company’s Web site that beginning in the early 1960s, he was charged and convicted of a multitude of crimes, including theft, stealing cars and passing bad checks.

After getting out of federal prison in 1989, he appeared to be trying to remake his life, using his criminal background and showman skills to become an expert on how to avoid crime.

College professors in Texas said Stanley took sociology and criminology courses and worked as a consultant to insurance companies.

In 2000, he self-published a guide to traveling safely in Mexico and was planning to publish his autobiography, Becoming Criminal, this fall.

He also was featured in The Dallas Morning News as host of a nighttime radio show called Crime Wise with John Stanley.

But one of his former college professors said he had heard from Stanley recently and that he seemed frustrated and leaning toward returning to the life.

“He said, ‘I’ll just go rob a store and get back in where I can survive,’” said Michael Lauderdale, a sociology professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “I regarded this as a probability but I hoped it was a faint probability.”

About 2 years ago I was working for the Kotzebue Police department in Kotzebue Alaska, which is about 30 miles north of the arctic circle. In Kotzebue the only access to Anchorage and the outside world is the Alaska Airlines 737 service. The main runway ends at the shore line to the Chuckchi sea, but there is a road running between the end of the runway and the beach. When a plane is landing or taking off there are large gates with lights like a railroad crossing that lower and keep pedestrians and vehicles out of the way. Also a DOT worker stations themselves in a truck at one end of the road to watch for violators and advise the jet to stop or abort the landing or take off.

One after noon I received a dispatch to respond for an intoxicated male on the roadway while the jet was trying to take off. The jet had taxied to the end of the runway near the road and turned around to take off. I arrived a found the jet gone and a very wet drunk staggering out of the water. The drunk could not tell me what had happened and the DOT worker was laughing to hard and was in tears at the time. So after taking the drunk 20 year old male home and providing him with a citation for Minor Consuming Alcohol I returned to find out what had happened.

Apparently our hero had been staggering down the road headed home after getting smashed in a local area known as South Tent City while the jet was taxiing. Being in a less then alert state he walked past the flashing lights and gates and DOT could not get to him to move him because of the back blast from the jet. The jet turned around and was getting ready to leave when it was advised of the drunk staggering behind the engines. The pilot waited for about 10 minutes and after not hearing another word from the DOT worker assumed the drunk was gone and hit the throttles to take off. Well our drunk was not out of the way yet and had apparently paused for a breather behind the jet while walking to enjoy those nice exhaust fumes. He was picked up by the engine back blast and cleared 30 feet of beach and about 50 feet of water before coming in for splash down. Luckily for him the water temperature is about a constant 38 degrees in the arctic and about 20 feet deep where he landed it apparently brought him around enough to swim to shore.

A woman who said she found a mouse in her soup at a Cracker Barrel restaurant last month made up the hoax, the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office said Tuesday.

Carla Patterson, 36, and her son, Ricky Patterson, 20, both of the 100 block of Westview Drive in Hampton, were charged Tuesday with attempted extortion and conspiracy to commit a felony after they tried to get Cracker Barrel to give them money in the hoax, said Howard Gwynn, Newport News’ commonwealth’s attorney.

Patterson was eating at the Newport News restaurant, across from Patrick Henry Mall on Jefferson Avenue, on May 8 when she said she discovered the mouse in a bowl of vegetable soup. Her screams prompted other patrons to leave the restaurant, and the incident caused Cracker Barrel to stop serving vegetable soup at all of its 497 stores nationwide.

The Pattersons were arrested Tuesday after a sting operation in which officials from Cracker Barrel met them at an undisclosed location and handed them a check, with law enforcement officials witnessing the handover from nearby, Gwynn said. The police department’s economic crimes unit had developed the plan for the arrest after gathering evidence in recent days, police said.

Julie Davis, a corporate spokeswoman at Cracker Barrel’s headquarters near Nashville, Tenn., said the Pattersons had demanded $500,000 from the company.

Under the deal that Cracker Barrel had arranged with the Pattersons for the sting, the restaurant chain was to turn over the money in exchange for pictures of the mouse that Ricky Patterson had taken with his cell phone camera. Also as part of the deal, Davis said, Ricky Patterson was to publicly admit that he had made up the story.

But instead of getting to keep the check, the Pattersons got arrested.

“We are very grateful for the effort of the law enforcement officials and that this fraud has been exposed,” Davis said of the arrests. “We are very relieved for the employees of our stores, especially our Newport News store. They were brave and maintained an excellent level of customer service despite three weeks of negative publicity and jokes on Leno and Letterman. This restores our reputation and our good name.”

The Newport News store suffered greatly in the incident, she said, with business slowing down substantially. The store’s workers lost tips, and some were transferred to other stores to make up hours they lost to the slowdown.

Davis said Cracker Barrel had undertaken an in-depth investigation as soon as the Pattersons said they found the mouse.

But when the laboratory analysis of the small, black mouse came back, Davis said, it was clear that something was amiss. “It was a very methodical investigation, and we knew that something was very wrong,” she said.

For one thing, she said, the autopsy showed that the mouse had not drowned, and was not cooked. The mouse did not have any soup in its internal system. The mouse, Davis said, died of a skull fracture.

There was no evidence of rodent activity at the Newport News restaurant, she said. Further, an independent audit of the vendor that provided the soup to Cracker Barrel in bags, she said, indicated that it would have been impossible for the mouse to make it through the soup-making process in one piece.

On Thursday, a Cracker Barrel lawyer in Roanoke contacted the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office in Newport News, and company officials later laid out the evidence that they had gathered so far. Gwynn said his office advised Cracker Barrel to take additional steps and ask additional questions of the Pattersons. Ultimately, his office arranged the sting operation with the police department.

“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that will come out at trial,” Gwynn said of the information his office has gathered.

Carla Patterson, the vice president of athletics for the Denbigh Youth Football and Cheerleading Association, part of the city’s Parks and Recreation department, could not be reached Tuesday. Her son Ricky also could not be reached. They were being booked at Newport News City Jail, police said.

A man already charged with breaking into a car and taking something had another offense added to his legal problems after police accused him of stealing the cell phone of the arresting officer as the officer took him to Orange County Jail.

Zachary Lee Foust, 19, of Lincoln Lane, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, initially faced a charge of felony breaking and entering an auto and misdemeanor larceny. Police accused him of breaking into a 1988 white Pontiac Firebird at Abbey Court Condominiums about 4 a.m. Saturday and taking a speaker box from the car, according to Carrboro police reports.

He was placed under a $1,500 secured bond and taken to Orange County Jail.

On the ride to the jail, Foust allegedly managed to take the Carrboro police officer’s cell phone from the patrol car’s center console, according to reports.

When he got to the jail, the officer noticed his cell phone was missing. He thought he had misplaced it and intended to look for it later, according to the report.

But in the booking room, the officer noticed that Foust seemed very nervous and did not want to look at the officer. As Foust shifted in his chair, the officer heard a beep. The officer searched Foust and found his missing cell phone in Foust’s left shoe, according to the report.

“I removed my phone and advised him I would be back with another warrant,” the officer wrote in his report.

The officer returned to the jail at 9:32 a.m. Saturday with a warrant charging Foust with misdemeanor larceny, according to the report.

A camera helped clue in police who were trying to catch two burglars.

Police said the suspects allegedly stole a getaway vehicle, which was left abandoned with clues inside, including several cameras.

From the pictures, Lower Allen Township, Pennsylvania police have identified two suspects: Marqus Anthony Stahl, 22, last known to reside in Lemoyne and Michael E. Wolfe, 25, also last known to reside in Lemoyne.

Police said two burglars broke into a home in Silver Spring Township, Cumberland County.

“The police departments are happy that a lot of are criminals are just dumb,” Silver Spring Township Police Chief Walter Hughes said.

“We had the film developed from the cameras and it was found that the last photos were of the subjects,” Lower Allen Township Chief Charles Snyder said.

Police believe the burglars took each other’s pictures.

Police also recovered knives and screwdrivers used by the burglars to break into homes. Police said it’s possible the criminals could be dangerous.