I am a Sheriff’s Deputy and this story happened back in the summer of 2003. I was working in a small town of about one thousand people. One of the services we provided was to sit at the local “Quick-E-Mart” while the clerk closed up for the night. While I was sitting there I saw a vehicle pull up to the gas pumps and a young man (we’ll call him Jim) get out and go about the business of pumping gas.

A few moments later I observed Jim staggering towards me with a credit card in his hand. I knew the night was going to get interesting when he dropped his card and followed it to the ground while asking me if I could help him with the pump.

I drove over and blocked his car in and watched him proceed to try and stick his credit card in every nook and cranny of the gas pump every which way he could think of. It was during that show that I detected the smell of an alcoholic beverage (or several) and was about to arrest him when he opened the door to his car. The entire driver’s side was covered with vomit.

I asked him if he’d been drinking and he took out his cell phone to “call his handler,” as he put it. A few seconds later he was handing me the phone and telling me that “someone wants to talk to you”. He had called 911. I took the phone and asked the operator to call the jail and get a cell ready.

Very soon after that, he was handcuffed in the back of my cruiser and screaming that he had been arrested eight times that week and how it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t have a shotgun to “blow that (expletive deleted) pig’s head off with.” His tirade, of course, was caught on tape.

Two weeks ago, my daughter, a freshman at the University of Cincinnati, had her wallet stolen while she was participating in an intramural basketball game.

It contained her student ID, a bank debit card, driver’s license and room keys. She reported it to the campus police, and then to her bank to cancel the debit card. At that time, she found out that the debit card had been used at a gas station just off campus.

Two days later, the wallet was returned, minus the debit card and student ID card. The student ID card can also be used as a debit card at on-campus and some selected off campus locations. When she checked the balance on her student ID card, she found that it had been used at an off campus pizzeria, where they had placed an order that totalled $45.00, and then had it delivered to their dorm.

Police also checked the video system at the gas station. They had obligingly come inside to make a purchase, and stood directly in front of one of the in-store surveillance cameras.

Their initial court appearance is pending.

After six years of telling you about the dumbest crooks in the world, we thought we’d seen it all. Then Troy Deshaun Ferguson came along.

What did he do? Well, he allegedly served as the getaway driver in the armed robbery of a liquor store. Then he allowed someone to snap a photo of him holding a gun. To make matters worse, Ferguson then got into a shouting match with a young woman over the telephone.

Officer Steve Winston stopped by to see what all the shouting was about. The young woman said she loaned Ferguson $125 for his cellular phone account and wanted her money back. After Officer Winston separated the two, the woman told him that her friend Ferguson had been involved in a robbery and that Ferguson had shown her a picture on his cell phone of him with a gun. Ferguson then confessed that he had been the getaway driver in the liquor store holdup.

While most young people his age are pursuing higher education or making other plans to advance their careers, a 22 year-old Santa Cruz California genius was planning to vandalize a local store. According to his carefully crafted plan, the man would splash some green paint on the front doors of The Gap on Pacific Avenue and then make a clean getaway. It was a pretty good plan, as ignorant schemes go, but for one problem. The man was caught after trailing green paint from Pacific Avenue to his home on Mission Street.

Now our young rocket scientist must pay the city’s clean-up costs, estimated to be $1,000, pay a $500 fine, serve 200 hours of community service and stay away from downtown.

I have two stories about one guy I used to know. He was perpetually drunk though it never stopped him from driving anywhere. One time he got caught for DUI by a foot patrol officer, who saw him driving erratically down the main street of town at a very slow speed.

When told to “pull over, driver!” he drove his car up onto the sidewalk and crashed it through the plate glass windows of a large department store.

Lucky for him it was late at night and nobody was injured. His blood-alcohol reading was above 4% — an incredible figure in itself.

This same driver, again leglessly drunk, was driving towards a bar/restaurant where he was to meet me and a few friends. The road to the place (a landmark building, brightly illuminated at night) is at the end of a long, straight road that has a sharp deviation immediately before it which crosses a canal. Dumb drunk, seeing the lights straight ahead, drove straight into the canal. It didn’t stop him from getting to the party though, and he appeared covered up to his chest in thick, black mud.

An 18 year-old Florida crack dealer was shot three times while doing business with his customers. Five days after leaving the hospital, he was back in business, according to police reports.

The young man was pulled over for a burned out license plate light on the back of his Jeep. The officer smelled marijuana as he approached the Jeep and asked the young man to exit the vehicle. As the man got out, forty-seven rocks of crack cocaine fell to the ground.

“Is that what I think it is?” the officer asked.

“I don’t know,” Our Jeep driver replied. “Must have been something in my lap.”

About eight years ago, in the hallway of the felony court, I happened to meet a Detroit police officer I knew, whose duty was as a court officer in the lower court. I asked him what he was doing there.

My friend told me that he was a witness in a robbery case. Two armed men had robbed a homeowner in Detroit. They had knocked on the door of the house. When the owner came to the door, they went into the “your-money-or-your-life” routine. The homeowner said he would get the money and closed and locked the door. He retrieved some money, opened the door, and gave it to the robbers. While I was laughing, my friend says, “Wait, it gets better!”

The homeowner called the police, who arrested one of the robbers. At the culprit’s preliminary examination (to determine whether there is enough evidence to charge the defendant with a felony), the homeowner is asked to identify the defendant. This was in my friend’s courtroom, and why he was a witness in the felony court.

The prosecutor says to the homeowner, “Do you see either of the men who robbed you in court, today?”

The victim says, “Yes, one of the men is sitting at the counsel table with his attorney, wearing a grey sweater. . . . and the other one is sitting there in the audience.”

Sure, enough, the idiot had come to court for his accomplice’s hearing.