COOL PARENTS Last week we reported on a man who let a friend borrow his car in 2018 and reported the car as stolen a year later when the friend hadn’t returned it yet. This week, a woman filed a report after her husband was even more inconsiderate with her Chevrolet Trailblazer. The 41-year-old west Charlotte woman called police at around 7 p.m. on a Saturday evening and told officers that her husband had “let an unknown teen borrow her car” at midnight on the previous night, and surprisingly, this mystery Gen Z-er hadn’t returned with the vehicle yet.
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL Police responded to a Shell gas station on Glenwood Drive in west Charlotte after receiving a call about a man who was sleeping in his running car at a gas pump. Officers quickly recognized the car as the suspect vehicle in a recent nearby robbery, and would eventually find that it was in fact the car used in the robbery. Upon searching the suspect, officers found a crack pipe, which probably explains where all the money from the robbery went. In a similar incident, police responded to a welfare check on Carmel Road after a woman was seen laying unconscious near the street. When officers woke her, she was found to be in possession of two purses, $200 worth of jewelry, two pairs of sunglasses, two unmatching shoes, $200 worth of prescription pills, a jewelry box and the driver’s license of the person she had stolen all these things from during a break-in at a nearby home.
SALTY Leslie’s Swimming Pool Supplies in north Charlotte is one store where we don’t often see shoplifting reports, but the fun thing about The Scanner is that anything can happen at any time. Police responded to the supply store one recent afternoon after staff said a man walked out with a $1,230 salt system designed for jacuzzis and never made any effort to pay for his selection.
MONOPOLY MAN A recent report about a dine-and-dasher in Uptown raises the question of what exactly a paying customer looks like. Officers responded to Capital Grille on North Tryon Street after a man drank four bottles of beer and took a shot of Jack Daniels before walking out on his tab. This happens all the time, to be sure, but this time it took servers by surprise because, according to the report, “the listed suspect came into the restaurant portraying himself as a paying customer.”
WHAT NEXT? A criminal report filed after a single-vehicle car wreck in southeast Charlotte just kept getting worse for the driver of the car. Officers responded to the scene of the crash on East W.T. Harris Boulevard near East Independence Boulevard on a rainy afternoon and found that the man who wrecked the car had been driving with a suspended license. Further investigation found that he had been driving well over the speed limit, despite the weather. A search of the car found a handgun lying on the suspect’s floorboard. Further investigation found that he is, in fact, a convicted felon and cannot be in possession of a handgun. Now’s about the time when you want to go ahead and plead the fifth.
NOT MINE A man found to be involved in a fight in NoDa recently could have used that Fifth Amendment when he found himself speaking with police officers. According to the report, police broke up the fight and, while interviewing those involved, found one of the men to be in possession of a car that had recently been stolen from a home in Waxhaw. The man readily admitted to police that he was driving the car and knew it to be stolen.
WASH IT DOWN A 22-year-old South End man filed a police report after someone broke into his work vehicle overnight recently and took a bevy of items, some of which more useful than others. According to the victim, the suspect stole his cellphone, two watches, a pair of sunglasses, a parking garage fob, two pairs of headphones and a pack of acid reflux medication.
DONGED OUT A local porch pirate probably thought they were rich when they opened a package they stole from the porch of a home in the Landsdowne area of south Charlotte, but no such luck. According to the 76-year-old victim of the crime, the package that was stolen from her porch contained 4,000,000 Vietnamese dongs, which has been the currency in that country since 1978. While that may seem like a whole lot of money, the conversion rate is only $1 for every .000043 dongs, putting the value of the package at around $252.
CATCH ‘EM ALL Pikachu’s powers were of no help during a recent car break-in in Dilworth recently. According to the 37-year-old victim, an unknown suspect broke into car and stole $50 worth of Pokémon cards — nothing else. In an unrelated incident that cost a victim 1,000 times the value of the previous theft, a 64-year-old man reported that someone had stolen $50,000 worth of sports memorabilia from his unit at Extra Space Storage in Lower South End.
All Scanner entries are pulled from CMPD reports. Suspects are innocent until proven guilty.
This work by Queen City Nerve is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
