This Week In Stupid, Abridged
By Matt Wood in News on Jan 19, 2007 8:15PM
Pat yourselves on the back Chicagoland, most of you managed to keep yourselves out of trouble this week. Usually by Friday, we can count on a whole heap of news stories about the stupid and depraved acts you manage to commit, but not so this week. Whatever the reason, you were on your best behavior. Maybe you're too excited about the Bears game. Maybe Barack Obama's almost presidential announcement still has you all a twitter, and you've been watching Oprah non-stop to make sure you don't miss the real thing. You made Chicagoist's already-taxing job harder this week, but that's not such a bad thing. So with that long-winded, apology/excuse in mind, enjoy this abbreviated week in stupid.
As we pointed out in last weekend's blotter, a Ford Heights man was arrested for impersonating a police officer ... to a bunch of other police officers. He was pulled over for speeding last Thursday and claimed to be a police officer. After he couldn't prove it, he was given a ticket for having tinted windows. Unable to stop himself while he was ahead, he called the police station twice afterwards to ask for the ticket to be waved. Officers told him to come to the station to file a formal complaint, and when he did, they arrested him. Not surprisingly, he already had one other conviction for impersonating an officer.
A Crown Point man was arrested last Saturday after crashing his mother's Cadillac into a utility pole. Soon after, police discovered that he had killed his mother and stepfather, and pawned his mother's gold ring and fake gold fingernails. We know this story isn't so much stupid as it is sick and depraved, but we also wonder if he ever stopped to think about how easy it would be to trace custom gold fingernails his now-missing mother had been known to wear for the past ten years before he pawned them.
Finally, Gary's Mayor Rudy Clay has had it up to here with illegal dumping in his fair city after a recycling company dumped a load of roofing shingles, old tires, and a 6-foot-long dead alligator in the city's Glen Park area. Police arrested the driver who dumped the gator garbage, who later said he was told he could dump the container any old place in the city.