The Scanner: When Fish Fly

INCOMING A 72-year-old woman called the police to her home in the Carmel Valley neighborhood in south Charlotte one afternoon after falling victim to one of the more perplexing crimes to ever appear in The Scanner. The woman told police that an unknown suspect broke her full-length dining room window “with a fish launched from an unknown apparatus.” Unfortunately, the report does not go any further into detail than that.

HOW RUDE A man from Costa Mesa, California, did not have a pleasant visit to Charlotte earlier this month, and he wanted to let people know about it. According to the report, the victim was at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport at around 3 p.m. and “wanted to report that an employee was rude.” This guy must have a hell of a time at the DMV. Not surprisingly, the report stated that the so-called victim was drunk at the time he filed the report.

LOVE YOU, MA A woman spent Mother’s Day in jail after going into a local convenience store for a gift but getting too aggressive in the process. According to an employee at a Circle K gas station on East Independence Boulevard, the suspect walked into the store at around 10:45 a.m., visibly drunk. The suspect attempted to walk out of the store with a 12-pack of Bud Light and a bouquet of roses, and that’s when shit went downhill. A 43-year-old employee confronted the shoplifting suspect, who grabbed the employee around the neck. A man who happened to be in the store tried to break up the melee, only for the suspect to turn on him, scratching him and attempting to punch him. The man and employee were able to detain the woman until police arrived, at which time she cursed at officers and refused to stand up from the floor to leave the business. When officers finally dragged her ass out to the car, the woman continued to obstruct by refusing to put her feet inside the vehicle so they could close the door. She was eventually taken to jail, and somewhere a mother went without flowers.

BUT THEN I GOT HIGH It’s unclear whether a woman in the Hickory Ridge neighborhood of east Charlotte was at fault for a hit-and-run that took place on a recent early morning or if she was just a stoner with bad luck. A Hyundai Elantra was found to be at fault for a hit-and-run that occurred at around 1:24 a.m., and when police found the car unattended, they went to the registered owner’s home. The woman told them she had come home at around 12:30 a.m. that same morning, and because she had been smoking weed, she left the keys on the floorboard and the car doors unlocked. The car was reported as stolen in the report, but we’re not so sure we’re buying that.

GHOST GARAGE A 49-year-old man in the Highland Creek area of north Charlotte was left confused after some unknown suspect started messing with him at his home recently. The man said he was asleep in his home at around 2:40 a.m. when he heard his garage door open. By the time he got up and made it to the garage to see what was going on, nobody was there, but he could see that someone had rummaged through his car. The suspect only stole one thing from the car: the garage door opener.

BUMP IT A recent road rage incident on Sharon Road West in south Charlotte ended anticlimactically, about the way you’d imagine a road rage incident in south Charlotte would end. According to one 42-year-old man who was involved, he kicked another car during an argument with a driver, and that driver bumped his car with their own car, doing $1,000 in damage to his BMW.

YARDWORK Whereas romantic men used to throw pebbles at a love interest’s window to rouse them from sleep, one guy put technology to use in north Charlotte recently. A 57-year-old woman filed a report stating that a known suspect broke the window to her bedroom with a weedeater when he was working on the yard.

WHAT, NO FORK? A man working at the beloved halal cart that sets up at the intersection of Trade and Tryon streets on a daily basis ran into a man who wasn’t such a big supporter. According to the employee, the suspect came up to the food cart at 9 p.m. and asked for some free food. When the employee denied, the man became angry and punched the cart, which spilled sauce inside the cart and on the victim. Then the suspect upped the ante by pulling out a knife, at which time the victim closed up shop for the evening.

FANNY PACKING Be careful whom you make fun of for wearing a fanny pack; that should be the takeaway from one crime report that came out of northwest Charlotte recently. A 59-year-old woman filed a report about a car break-in outside of a home she was visiting, in which the thief took off with a fanny pack she had lying in plain view. Within the fanny pack, a Windicator EAA .357 revolver.

IN THE ACT Police responded to a burglary from a business in Uptown recently and caught a man who apparently lacked a sense of urgency in his criminal activity. Police received a call from a witness who saw the suspect breaking into Woodie’s Auto Service on North Tryon Street around 7:45 p.m. The witness gave a description of the burglar, but police didn’t need it. When they arrived on the scene, they caught a man walking out of the broken glass door he had just kicked in. He was holding a six-pack of beer, two packs of Pall Malls and a 32-ounce foam cup filled with soda. He apparently didn’t go quietly, however, as he was later charged with damage to city property for doing $500 in damage to the squad car door after his arrest.

TED WAS HERE Police responded to an apartment complex near the Hidden Valley neighborhood in north Charlotte to help on an “attempt to locate” call, but what they found was something out of The Shining. According to the report, the officer spoke with a property manager at the Hunters Pointe apartments, who told them that while doing the rounds of vacant apartments, they found blood splatter, and nearby someone had written, “I killed someone here” across the wall in a red substance that looked like blood.

All Scanner entries come from CMPD reports. Suspects are innocent until proven guilty.