In March, Jonathan P. Mitchell, dressed in black and wet from crawling in the nighttime mud up to a store in the KOA campground near Watsonville, Calif., was found by police, stuck and dangling from the rafters after trying to climb in through the roof. However, the manager admitted that he had not locked the door that night and that Mitchell could have just walked in. Three weeks earlier, in Fostoria, Ohio, thieves broke in and carried off a safe in the office of a local organization that serves the poor (Fostoria Bureau of Concern), but director Susan Simpkins said that not only was the safe empty but the bureau had decided to junk it a while back and was looking for someone to haul it away. [KTRK-TV (Houston)-AP, 3-24-05] [News-Messenger (Fremont, Ohio), 3-8-05]
Joseph R. Holland, 23, who escaped in February from prison in Schuylkill County, Pa. (near Allentown), but who was captured the following day, wrote to a judge in March disputing the escape charge against him: (1) The warden never told him he couldn't escape, he said (in his syntax-challenged petition). "(I) was never provided with any orientation, a handbook or ever signed any contract ... I was never informed to follow any rules, cause I knew no rules!" (2) "I wasn't gone over 24 hours, and all my personal belongings were ever here. I had every intention of coming back, who's to say any different?" (3) And besides, he said, the guards actually opened the gate for him (even though it was really for another inmate coming in, with Holland managing to sneak out at the same time). [Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.), 3-19-05]
Steven Jakaitis, 42, was arrested in Quincy, Mass., in March outside a CVS pharmacy, where police said he fell asleep while preparing to rob the place. His car was idling; a stocking was on his head and a pistol in his pocket; and the piece of paper beside him read, "I have a Gun DO NOT Press any Alarms or let Custermors (sic) know Empty the All (sic) the register." [Patriot Ledger (Quincy), 3-15-05]
Roy Allen Boothe Jr., 18, was arrested after allegedly attempting to rob a Delta One Shop convenience store near York, Pa., in January. When he threatened the two female clerks with a tire iron, the women started punching and kicking him, until he begged for them to stop. After a few minutes (but with police on the way), he managed to wiggle away and run (though one clerk slugged him with his own tire iron on the way out). [York Daily Record, 1-27-05]
Shame on them, they are definitely not the smartest people trying to work around law.