Tuesday, October 21, 2014
ODDLY ENOUGH
Instead of a ticket, officer buys young girl a booster seat
EMMETT TOWNSHIP, Mich.
A Michigan officer who pulled over a vehicle because a 5-year-old girl wasn’t secured in a booster seat decided a ticket wouldn’t cut it.
Instead, Emmett Township public safety officer Ben Hall bought her a seat.
“A ticket doesn’t solve the situation,” Hall told WXMI-TV. “What solves it is the child being in the booster seat like she should be. It was the easiest 50 bucks I ever spent.”
Hall was on patrol recently in the southern Michigan community when he pulled over the vehicle after someone reported that it had an unsecured young child inside. Alexis DeLorenzo and her daughter were riding with a friend, and Hall said DeLorenzo told him that she had fallen on hard times and couldn’t afford a booster seat.
“I was in a spot where I could help her,” Hall said.
DeLorenzo said she knew that they could have been ticketed, but instead, DeLorenzo told her to meet him at a Walmart, where he bought her the seat.
“It changed my life,” DeLorenzo said. “I’m never going to forget him. And neither will my daughter.”
Patient takes the wheel of parked ambulance in Arizona
GOODYEAR, Ariz.
Authorities say a patient wanting out of an Arizona hospital used an ambulance as his getaway vehicle.
Goodyear police spokeswoman Lisa Kutis says Michael Lopez hijacked a parked ambulance recently outside West Valley Hospital in metro Phoenix.
Kutis says a firefighter sitting in the back was able to jump out safely.
Police pursued Lopez, who failed to pull over. Authorities used GPS to locate the vehicle and Lopez at his home in the suburb of Avondale.
Kutis says he was arrested on charges of theft of means of transportation, felony flight, failure to yield to police and disorderly conduct.
She did not know why Lopez was hospitalized.
She says Lopez, who felt he was being hospitalized against his will, was being booked into a Phoenix jail.
The ambulance was returned to firefighters.
Associated Press