Last night I saw my friend Sean sitting in a parking lot as I drove by. He had just been on a fight call that sounded interesting on the radio so I went to ask him about it. As soon as I pulled up Sean said, “This would make a great blog story.”
Sean was sent to a call in which a couple of women were fighting. When he arrived, Sean saw them still fighting and yelling at each other on the east side of the street. He separated everyone and waited for the other officers to arrive.
“Have a seat and tell me what happened,” Sean said to one of the women.
The woman was breathing hard and was upset, but she sat down as she said, “I’m the oldest. She’s my sister and we were trying to get her back into the car.”
The woman then stood up as she looked across the street like she was stranded on a life boat and just saw land for the first time in a month. That’s when she said, “Where’s my car?”
“Where did you park your car?” Sean asked.
“Across the street. Where’s my mother fucking car?”
The woman then ran across a major road without looking for traffic. It’s amazing she didn’t get hit by a car. She screamed “Where’s my car?” the entire time. Once she got to the west side of the street she ran back across to where Sean was while she was still yelling, “Where’s my car?”
When she got back she told Sean, “Do something! You’re the police!”
“Did you leave your car running with the keys in it?”
“Yeah! Where’s my car?”
“What kind of car do you have?”
“Hurry! The longer you wait, the farther it gets away!”
She was so distraught her brother had to scream at her to calm down. When she finally was able to give a description of the car she told the officers it had paper plates.
Sean told me, “I bet the suspect saw the car and drove away while I was across the street.”
I wish I had been there! You can’t make this stuff up.
Badge415 
In 1982, my nine-year-old brother got fed up with my parents arguing “all of the times” (sic) and decided he was going to “run away.” And this one night, after my parents went to bed…around 11 p.m., that kid actually opened the front door and was gone… As the dutiful 12-year-old protector of said 9-year-old, I had little choice than to find him. It wasn’t hard to do…but we wandered around the neighborhood, the local liquor store, dark apartment complexes…he had his little bag of “gear” which included a peanut butter sandwich and a Rubik’s Pyramid in case he got bored. We played with it under the ungodly amber light in the parking lot of the liquor store…just a couple of dumb little kids trying to get away from a stressful, abusive household. We made our way up to the main boulevard and were just truckin’ along when a member of the local municipal law enforcement agency edged to the corner opposite us in his squad car…and then drove over to investigate.
I remember being desperate to try to talk my 12-year-old way out of this new potential crisis, trying to balance the ass-kicking I’d already get (if I couldn’t convince my brother to quietly return to the house and pretend he’d never set off on such a ridiculous misadventure) with what would surely either result in an epic ass-kicking, the depth and breadth of which my young mind could hardly even imagine, if it also involved having to be paraded around by the police at one in the morning on a workday…or, of course, going to jail because who knows what they do to kids who leave their home to go wandering around like criminals in the dead of night.
My conspiratorial mind generated a scenario that I was sure would convince any reasonable person: my brother and I were out looking for our dog who got out of the backyard, and my father had said we had to go looking for it and not to come back until we found it…or there’d be an epic ass-kicking. There was the classic grain-of-truth nestled in between the characteristic “everything else blown out of proportion” quality of a blatant falsehood, the kind of which I’m sure any law enforcement professional is thoroughly familiar with, having heard them daily or nightly…for years (sigh…people, what can you do).
Anyway, I ran around like an idiot for about a minute, convinced that if I only sold it hard enough… Well, I’m no salesman. So, we were ferried into the squad car…and of course my stalwart brother was now reduced to a blubbering moron. The officer pulled into the driveway of our house, and inquired as to whether or not he needed to go to the door. I didn’t realize it then…but I think I recognize it now…that he knew the kind of situation that was going on… For whatever reason, he let us just slink to the front door…which I discovered was still blessedly unlocked, and the house was quiet, which meant the parents were still asleep…we waved as we opened the door…and the officer slowly drove out and away. We closed the door, went to our rooms…whispered a little about the adventure, and then went to sleep.
Above all, I was incredibly happy that the world had not come to an end and that, most of all, the parents had been asleep the whole time. I slept the sleep of angels that night.
…which was really good, because when I woke up and my brother blurted out “I hope you guys don’t mind but we ran away last night and rode in a cop car” at the breakfast table, I got that ass-kicking I had been fearing…with the added insult that there was no chance in hell that my brother would ever have started the whole mess…and that I should be ashamed of myself that I “dragged him out the door.”
:: rolls eyes :: I survived with my sense of humor intact. …I kind of wish I knew who that officer was, though, now…because I think he handled it in a very sensitive way that I can only now fully appreciate.
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Oh, I almost forgot…lol. All that to say…I wonder if there was ever an actual car…or whether this was just another case of “No, no…really…I have a dog, his name is Fido and he was just right here!”
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