Weird World of Crime: Special Automotive Edition

Cecil Cramer, an Indiana man who’d lost his driver’s license, was pulled over for erratic driving and claimed to be his own brother Robert. He might have gotten away with it, if not for the CECIL tattooed on the back of his neck.

A German man who’d lost his driver’s license was pulled over for drunk driving, and claimed to be a friends of his. He might have gotten away with it, if… no, actually, there was no way he could have gotten away with it: When the police officer called in the friend’s name, he learned the friend had a glass eye. This guy had two good eyes. “I used to have a glass eye,” he insisted, “but I don’t anymore.”

Which proves, I guess, that you should think about these things before you get drunk.

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“My car is broken and I need you to come fix it. And you’d better be quick because I’m really pretty drunk and I don’t have a license so it wouldn’t be good if the cops drove past”

The German driver with a flat tire and a blood alcohol level seven times the legal limit thought he’d called roadside assistance, of course, not the local police station…

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In Iowa, Kimberly Du thought she’d be able to get out of paying a stack of traffic tickets by faking her own death. She sent the judge both a letter “from her mother” claiming she’d died in a traffic accident (appropriately enough), and the printout from a forged copy of the Des Moines Register’s website, showing her obituary.

The charges were dropped and she might have gotten away with it, if she hadn’t been pulled over for speeding a month later…

Though Driving While Dead is technically not a crime, sending a judge forged documents can get you two years in prison.

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Breaking into an appliance repair store’s van to steal tools late one night this past May was easy for Angel Tarazon. Breaking out of the van, though… not so easy. The child safety locks activated and, separated from the front seat by a metal partition, all Tarazon could do was wait form Columbus Ohio police to come along to arrest him (though as my 12-year-old pointed out when he read this: With all those tools and nothing else to do with his time, he couldn’t have broken a window or otherwise found a way to get out?)

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Lithuanian driver – or former driver – Vidmantas Sungaila might hold the world record for drunk driving, after having been pulled over this past May and showing a Blood Alcohol Level of .727. He was tested twice, because the first results convinced police the machine must be broken. Sungaila’s BAC was eighteen times Lithuania’s legal limit of .04. The legal limit in the United States is .08. Death is more likely than not somewhere between .35 and .40. Somebody has survived with a BAC as high as 0.914; but not driving a truck down a highway and then holding an animated conversation with a police officer.

Sungaila was fined $1100 and lost his license for up to three years.

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Some good fortune for a pair of automotive professionals: In Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, Richard Houtz, the owner of a towing service and an auto parts store, was called by police to tow a van whose driver was driving erratically (and without a license or insurance) – and found, in the van, merchandise recently stolen the night before from his auto parts store.

While an auto mechanic in Gothenburg, Sweden had an even easier time of it: The man who’d stolen his car two days earlier drove it into his garage to make a service appointment.

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In Spokane, Washington, Police Lieutenant Dean Sprague, supervisor of traffic enforcement officers, has been demoted for twice being caught driving over 100mph – one of those times, on his way to a traffic safety conference.
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Here’s a clever scam: In Antwerp, Belgium, if you get ticketed for not buying the required one-day parking permit, you can go to Continental Computer Company’s website and buy somebody else’s “used” permit for that day, then take it to court with you, show it to the judge, and claim you had indeed bought one, and the police officer who wrote out the summons must not have noticed it. Local authorities are not pleased; but the owner of the company, Marc Van de Vyver, all wide-eyed innocence, insists, “We’re not doing anything illegal. Our website is simply a meeting place for collectors of parking tickets, just like there are websites for people who want to exchange stamps.”

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In Australia, three escapees from the minimum security Warakirri Correctional Centre, still wearing their prison uniforms, picked the wrong car to hitch a ride with: one driven by an undercover police officer who brought them directly to the local station house, probably the easiest three arrests he ever made.