We’ve all heard of people who have been in accidents that could have or should have killed them but were so drunk they weren’t even injured. Detective Adam Watson of Brunswick, Georgia, tells about one of those people whose amazing good luck managed to outstrip his sheer dumbness.
Watson was dispatched to an exclusive resort estate late one Saturday night to check on what was supposed to be a break-in with the suspect still on the premises. The terrified occupants of the house, an older couple by the name of Thompson, had whispered the story over the phone when they called police.
Around midnight, the Thompsons said, a man had appeared at the front door of their residence and begun pounding crazily, determined to gain entrance. Not surprisingly, they had refused to let him in. After several unsuccessful minutes the man had moved to the back door and continued his pounding. Then, as the Thompsons were phoning the police, they heard the sound of shattering glass and a loud thud that told them their intruder had somehow gained admittance. They didn’t try to find out how. They just locked themselves in their bedroom and waited for the police.
“When we arrived,” Watson says, “we began an immediate search of the home with weapons drawn. We came around the corner and entered a hallway on the first floor. And there in a crumpled heap lay the intruder— out cold. But it wasn’t until much later, when we got him to the hospital and he woke up, that we were able to piece together what really happened.”
The burglar, it turned out, wasn’t really a burglar. He was a high-powered executive who had been visiting friends at the resort. That night, he had gotten totally wasted in a local bar and then gotten lost. Drunk and unfamiliar with the area, he arrived at the Thompsons’ and assumed their home was the condo where his friends were staying. He had beaten frantically on all the doors, seeking admission.
Getting nowhere, he had next decided to scale the side of the house and climb in through a second-story window. First he tried to open it, then finally he smashed it and fell through.
Unfortunately for him, the window he chose was in a room with a cathedral ceiling. There was no second floor to land on. He fell twenty feet and landed in the first-floor hallway.
When the intruder was finally able to talk to police the next day, he told them that all he remembered was knocking on the door. He had no recollection of climbing up the house or falling twenty feet or being arrested—he was just too drunk to remember anything at all.
“We ended up charging the guy with criminal trespassing,” the officer states. “There was nothing else we could charge him with. He really wasn’t breaking in, and there was no criminal intent.”
And amazingly, the only ill effects he seemed to suffer from his twenty-foot fall were a few bruises.