Fire Department investigators in Knoxville, Tennessee, came up with their own bait to capture a man whom they suspect of making a series of phony 911 calls on his cell phone.

After receiving a false report of a gas leak on December 14, firefighters compared notes.

They confirmed 15 bogus 911 calls over a period of two months, including four house fires, six car crashes and various other medical emergencies. Every fake call came from the same cell phone.

So they called the number and left a message saying that the owner of the cell phone had won a gift card from a major retailer, according to Fire Captain Brent Seymour.

In less than an hour, Seymour received a call back from a man identifying himself as the owner of the cell phone. “He willingly gave his name and address,” Seymour said. “I told him I would be sending that gift card.”

But that wasn’t quick enough to please the man. He wanted the gift card in time for Christmas. So the investigators set up a meeting for that evening.

Seymour said he only waited a few minutes in a business parking lot before the suspect, identified as Jason Mark Harms arrived on foot, identified himself as the gift card recipient, whereupon he was arrested.

Seymour said Harms’ first words were, “You can’t prove it.”

But General Sessions Judge Charles Cerny found that the evidence was strong enough on December 27 to send 15 felony counts of making false reports against Harms to a Knox County grand jury.

The 29-year-old Harms gave authorities what I would consider a candidate for the dumbest excuse of 2006. He thought that he was doing taxpayers a favor by drawing otherwise lazy firefighters out of their cozy fire halls, court papers said.

Two brothers in Peabody, Massachusetts, caught a man who had allegedly broken into their mother’s house on Christmas Eve by pantsing him.

Sixty-one-year-old George Medeiros, and his 57-year-old brother John, at their mother’s home, when she wasn’t home, and realized that something was just not right.

When they entered her bedroom, they noticed a shadow and lifted up her bed to reveal a man on the ground.

The brothers fought the burglar, who police identified as 46-year-old Leroy Wallace of Lynn, Massachusetts.

While John attempted to pin Wallace, George called the cops. But with Wallace attempting to get away, John had no choice but to pull down the pants and underwear of his opponent.

“I figured it would slow him down if he got up to run,” said George.

The plan worked and the cops showed up to arrest Wallace on charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, armed burglary, and malicious destruction of property.

This is the time of year when burglars are hard at work, breaking into homes. For one man, his night of crime got the best of him.

NBC affiliate WKYC Channel 3 in Akron, Ohio, reports that Catherine Kantorick awoke to find that her home had been burglarized.

There were many other homes in the neighborhood that had been hit. Denese Parker opened her kitchen window to find a man sleeping on her porch. When Denese’s son, Glen, tried to wake him up, the suspect woke up swinging.

Glen started to fight with the burglar while Denese called 911.

Police arrested the burglar, identified as Dean Butler, a convicted burglar, who not only left his shoes behind at the Parkers’ house but Catherine Kantorick’s son’s camera, credit cards and items from her purse.

This burglar took only small items, things one may not notice are gone.

Investigators warn everyone in this Akron neighborhood to check their belongings and make sure they were not victims as well.

Police in Manchester, New Hampshire, say that Patrick Allain was still drinking after being stopped for driving drunk.

They say that Allain was drinking from a 40-ounce bottle of beer during his arrest there. According to police, he crashed into two other cars and at first refused to stop when officers attempted to pull him over. Authorities also point out that this is Allain’s fourth drunk-driving arrest.

A man who was busted for breaking into churches in Pulaski County, Arkansas, made it all too easy for sheriff’s deputies there to find him. He had left behind his wallet at one of the burglarized churches.

The suspect, identified as 19-year-old Joshua Hester, of Benton, is charged with commercial burglary and criminal mischief. He is free on $6,000 bail.

An official with the Natural Steps Baptist Church discovered on the morning of December 22 that someone had pried open doors. Nothing appeared to be missing. But the official, identified as James Browning, found a wallet on the ground near the church. Inside the wallet was $180 in cash and three credit cards with Hester’s name.

Soon afterward, deputies found Hester in Benton. Investigators there say Hester admitted to breaking into the church in the hope of stealing cash and music equipment. A police report says Hester also confessed to stealing $200 worth of property from the Monnie Springs Assembly of God Church on Ross Hollow Road on December 21.

Police in Santa Fe, New Mexico, didn’t have to wait very long to bust someone for stealing a laptop computer from a government building.

They say that all they had to do was follow footprints in the snow that measured eight inches deep on December 21.

Cops say that they followed the prints and found the suspect, identified as 31-year-old Mark Mendoza, who was out of breath and sweeping snow off a truck. You’d be out of breath too if you were trying to run through eight inches of snow.

They say he told them — before they had even asked — that he had done nothing wrong.

According to the officers, Mendoza’s lower pant legs were covered in snow and that the soles of his shoes matched the pattern of the footprints in the snow.

The authorities say that they found the lifted laptop in Mendoza’s apartment.

Mendoza faces breaking and entering, burglary, and other charges.

It was Friday night a couple of summers back.

My friend and I came out of a late movie downtown and walked a few blocks to my car on campus. It’s parked in a lot with an entrance drive that has rough cobblestone pavers and ruts that will shake your car to pieces.

We’re leaning against the car talking, when this early 60’s Chevy van comes barreling through the driveway doing at least 20. There’s a huge CRASH and we run over. A young guy, Hispanic in his early 20’s, is lying on the ground BEHIND the van. Blood – not a lot, fortunately – is oozing from his left temple.

I grab my cell phone, dial 911 and give the cops the only logical explanation for what just happened – this guy must have been crossing the alley and got run over.

To backtrack quickly, my friend had been leaning against the side of the car facing the entrance drive, and he had a better view than I did. He told me later the driver’s side door was hanging open when the van came through the alley – and this guy was riding on the door!

So the crashing sound was his body slamming into a power line pole! The van never hit anything. It wound up in a flowerbed.

So there we are. The guy is holding his head, trying to get up but can’t make it. A cop is yelling at me on the phone to keep him on the ground so we’re making ‘stay down’ gestures with our arms.
The van doors open - we hear beer bottles rolling out and smashing against the pavers – and three more young Hispanic guys pile out.

It’s a standoff. We don’t speak Spanish - or know who or what we’re dealing with. But they don’t threaten us or pull any weapons. They just want to get the hell out of there!

They try helping their friend up, but he’s not going anywhere. Suddenly, they take off running. A blue pickup rolls up, the guy gets out and without saying a word goes chasing after them.

I’m on the phone with the police this whole time, trying to tell them where we’re at. I find out the city police don’t know where anything is located on campus! Telling them which lot we’re in isn’t cutting it, so I finally run half a block to the edge of campus and read the street signs to tell them where to find us.

For the next few minutes it’s just the three of us. My friend gets some paper towels, but that’s all we can do for the guy.

Suddenly his friends come back - they must have ditched the guy chasing them – to make one last attempt at getting him out of there. It’s no good.

We’re finally hearing sirens, so they take off again.

This time the cops want me to keep an eye on them. I watch them run to the sidewalk across from campus. Suddenly one of the three starts beating the living hell out of one of the other guys. Knocks him down and just keeps pounding. The third guy’s not even watching. He just waits to be arrested. I tell the cops send another ambulance.

They arrive moments later and it’s cops everywhere. They pull me and my friend apart and see if our stories match before letting us go. The guy from the blue pickup comes back finally and tells me he works at a nearby parking garage. He’d seen the guys running and decided to chase them. I wouldn’t do that.

The newspapers don’t have anything the next day. Just as well, we don’t want our names in the paper or have reporters calling us. We go back and check out the blood on the pavers, but that’s it. We never found out what it was all about. Our best guess is a gang initiation or just drunk, crazy kids.