Posted on 11/21/2008 8:08:47 PM PST by An Old Man
A 67-year-old man robbed a downtown gas station, police said, then waited for Spokane officers to arrest him.
At 6:24 a.m., John Paul Adams walked into the Shell station at Third Avenue and Maple Street with a loaded .22 rifle, laid it on the counter and said, Give me what you got, said Spokane Police Officer Tim Moses.
When the clerk opened the till, the man grabbed several hundred dollars then told the clerk to call the cops, Moses said. Adams went outside, unloaded his gun, leaned it against a phone booth and then stood there and waited for us.
(Excerpt) Read more at spokesmanreview.com ...
"Adams wouldnt tell police what his motivation was, Moses said. Adams was not homeless. Police impounded the truck he was driving."
This popped out as I was crusing oacross the Internet earlier today. My first impression was the the man was homles and had sought a free bed at the expense of the County. Maybe more information will be forthcoming tomorrow.
Did they check to see if he had prison blueprints tattooed on his back?
the police had to be thinking “ I wish all arrests were this easy”.....they must’ve felt like they were dreaming..
That doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Now Adams can get 3 squares, medical care, dental care, cable TV, exercise facilities and you name it. Not to mention Ice Cream and cake.
He may be doing it to provide for her.
Or, if she was a nagging shrew, he's doing it to get away from her.
It might serve him right to get probation.
Wow...hope is in short supply today..
I know someone who delivered newspapers to boxes on sidewalks. He would just jump out, run around to the back of his van, open the doors and fill up the box. Turning it off and on too much would wear the starter out and he was right there. So this homeless guy jumps in and crashes into a fire hydrant. He was hungry he said.
I believe I might do the same if that were the only way to help.
I was doing some work over in the Spokane area about the time Mr. Carter was in the White house. Things got really out of hand and Pend Orille county had an unemployment rate in excess of 30%. Things were really bad and we used to joke about throwing a brick through the police station windows to procure a warm dry place to sleep.
I have this nagging feeling that what we only joked about will soon come to pass all over this nation. It brings back memories of the 1930's and the world I grew up in.
I heard of a prison guard in Canada that did the same thing. It turned out that his doctor told him he needed a triple bypass and that he wouldn’t survive the waiting list. He computed that for a first offense he would receive 9 month in prison for a robbing a convenience store...and prison inmates don’t have to wait for medical procedures in Canada.
Anybody remember “Barney Miller”, the comedic TV show about cops? It had an episode much like this, with the perp being a guy who had spent most of his life in jail and couldn’t adjust to life on the outside. So he committed some crime (I forget what) then waited for the police to come get him so he could go “home” to prison. I know that doesn’t sound like much of an amusing plot for a comedy sitcom, but it was; and true to the magic of TV, it worked out well for him in the end.
Happens a lot, unfortunately.
My parents were squirrels, saved every dime. They don't have to worry about SS going bust, because they never counted on it in the first place.
I'm not too worried about the economy tanking. My husband and I have faced financial wars before, and we're still standing, bayonetting the wounded. We know that possessions are just "things."
As long as I can feed my babies and keep a roof over their head (even if it means I sleep on the floor and give them the bed), no problem.
Several posters have offered reasons why this man might have committed the robbery, but no one has suggested this yet. He may have committed a different serious crime in the past and avoided capture or punishment, and now he feels he should do the time after all. So he commits this new crime to pay for the old one.
When I was in the Army, I witnessed what I call “the Mannheim effect”. A GI arrested for a drug offense “on the Strass”, i.e., off base in Germany could chose to face a court-martial or German civil authorities. Conviction was more or less a forgone conclusion in either case. It they faced German civil authorities, they’d do six months in Mannheim, a German prison, if they chose court-martial two years in Levenworth. They invariably chose the court-martial.
My conclusion: the Germans get a lot more deterence for their buck. Especially considering German prison are ultra sparse. A prisoner is confined in a cell with no glass on the windows, no TV, no recreation (half an hour a day outside the cell for walks in the exercise yard), no library. Like in the old days. Their prisons cost much less to run and violators fear them more.
That’s one way to get away from a nagging wife.
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