Posts Tagged ‘parking lot’
“Stolen car” parks itself in garage – found 17 days later!
Constable Kynan Lang inspects the garage which the ‘stolen’ car rolled into at Stirling
A car reported as stolen from an Australian car park has been reunited with its owner, after apparently parking itself in a closed garage.
Adelaide police say they think the car rolled down an incline in the car park, across a street and into a garage forcing itself under the roller doors. The door closed behind it and the car remained undetected for 17 days until the home-owners returned from holiday.
Fearing a burglary, they called police, who deduced the curious turn of events.
“Although the roller door was closed, it had been damaged slightly and pushed out of its tracks,” a police spokesman is quoted in Australian media as saying.
Police believe that the car had not been left in the parking gear and so rolled though the car park and eventually “forced itself under the roller door, parking perfectly inside the garage where it remained safely under cover for 17 days”.
Har!
Coppers trying to track down iPlank scammers
In a new variation on the “brick in a box” scam, a South Carolina woman who thought she purchased an iPad from two men in a McDonald’s parking lot discovered yesterday that the purported tablet was actually “a piece of wood painted black with an Apple logo.”
According to a Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office report, Ashley McDowell, 22, told deputies that she was approached by two black males who claimed to have purchased iPads in bulk and were selling them for $300 apiece. After McDowell explained that she only had $180, the duo agreed to sell her the device at a cut rate.
But when McDowell drove home and opened the FedEx box containing the iPad, she instead discovered the wood with the Apple logo. The “screen”–which was framed with black tape–included replicas of iPad icons for Safari, mail, photos, and an iPod. It also had what cops described as a “Best Buy sales ticket…”
Deputies have dusted the phony iPad for fingerprints. McDowell told probers that the swindlers were driving “a white Impala with no rims and no tint.” One of the men, she noted, “had a gold tooth.”
Har.
Here’s a link to the original police report. How did they keep a straight face?
Killer releases his son after SWAT standoff, kills himself
The scene at sunrise this morning – Soto’s SUV at the right
Update 5:10 a.m.: César Meléndez, the 5-year-old boy abducted by his father Tuesday after a shooting in southwest Santa Fe is safe and in the custody of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
His father, 39-year-old, José Meléndez-Trillo, was located shortly after midnight Wednesday morning and, after a short police pursuit in southwest Santa Fe, barricaded himself and the boy in a 1997 Ford Expedition off County Road 56 west of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport.
After about a four-hour standoff with police, Meléndez-Trillo released the boy and immediately turned a gun on himself around 4 a.m., according to Sheriff’s Office Lt. Adan Mendoza. Police fired no shots and Mendoza credited all local law-enforcement for their assistance with the case.
Update 12:54 a.m.: Lt. Adan Mendoza of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed that the suspect in Tuesday’s fatal shooting, José Meléndez-Trillo, has been found off County Road 56 west of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport, and officers are negotiating the release of his 5-year-old-son. Mendoza said the man and his son are in a vehicle, but could not elaborate.
The road toward La Cienega was blocked off at Huey Road, one mile west of N.M. 599. By 1 a.m. members of the Santa Fe Police Department’s SWAT team were beginning to assemble near the scene. One officer said Meléndez-Trillo was still armed and officers were in the process of moving the road block east to N.M. 599.
RTFA. This is why we didn’t get any sleep, last night. It all happened just beyond the bosque behind our home.
We were woken by the sirens of the cars chasing Soto down county road 56 just a tad before midnight. By the time I’d run out into the courtyard they were stopped – you could hear him shouting “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Yo soy an Americano.”
I went back into the house to get shoes on – and as I came back out the scene moved to the petroglyphs parking area a couple hundreds further south – on the west side of the road.
The coppers were superb, professional – especially whoever was in charge of trying to talk Soto out of his Ford Expedition over a loudspeaker. In very good Spanish with an Anglo accent.
He kept ask “Señor Soto” to release his niño – tried to get him to call a phone number which I presume was the officer’s cellphone so they might negotiate. I have no idea if that ever worked.
Around 4AM we heard the shot which must have been Soto killing himself – after releasing his little boy.
Smart crooks of the day!
A group of burglars padlocked the gates to a French police station car park before carrying out a raid on a supermarket.
The gang then smashed through plate glass windows and stole laptop computers and mobile phone from the Carrefour store in the town of Feurs, near Lyon, France.
Police took ten minutes to cut their way through the locked gates of the car park – arriving at the scene to find the robbers had fled…
A Feurs police spokesman added: “An investigation is under way, but it does seem as if we are dealing with a very well prepared gang of professional thieves.”
The burglary at around 2.30am on Monday comes three months after another armed gang padlocked police station gates before a bank raid near Paris.
They also blocked an access road to the bank with a burning car before using explosives to blow open a cashpoint machine at the BNP-Paribas bank in Aulnay-sous-Bois.
The four gunmen armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles then stole several hundred thousand euros in cash before fleeing on two high-powered motorbikes, and were never caught.
Looks like it’s getting easier than ever to acquire high-powered weapons in Europe.
Ah, the cultural influences of America spread worldwide.
Parking lot attendants training to fight terror
The next time you pull into a parking garage and the attendant gives you the once-over, he or she may be taking note of more than just the shiny rear spoiler on your new car. As part of a new government initiative, parking lot attendants and other transportation workers are being trained as the next line of defense in the fight against terrorism.
The First Observer program was introduced to parking lot professionals at a Las Vegas, Nevada, convention in May, days after a vendor in New York’s Times Square spotted a suspicious vehicle and helped thwart what could have been a deadly terrorist attack…
“No matter how banal it seems, if something seems different to you or suspicious, we want you to report it,” said Jeff Beatty, a former CIA and FBI agent.
And our government will tell you what is suspicious!
Beatty led the First Observer program’s pilot training session Monday in Atlanta, Georgia. He and a team of Transportation Security Administration officials trained some 60 parking lot officials and representatives on how to spot suspicious vehicles carrying hazardous materials or other activity that may signal the planning phases of a terrorist attack…
The training is part of a $15.5 million program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and administered by the Transportation Security Administration…
“We like who you are as parking lot professionals. We want you to ‘observe, assess and report.’ “
Har!
Any innocent act can be deemed suspicious in the eyes of a bureaucrat governed by fear. Fear of terrorists, fear of people who look different, fear of people whose thinking doesn’t fall into official pattern recognition.
Our federal government is incapable of understanding the difference between neighbors keeping an eye on things next door when the family is away for a picnic – and spying on a garage band that dresses funny. That’s not especially new. Governments seem to have that problem forever.
What stinks is when paranoia becomes institutionalized. When peering under your bed at night becomes part of education, law and policing.
