When Detectives Ted McDonald and Adam Watson of the Brunswick (Georgia) Police Department answered this particular home burglary call, they expected a routine report—missing TVs and VCRs, an empty jewelry box, perhaps a hijacked coin collection. But they were in for a big surprise.
As the two detectives drove to the address the victim had given them over the phone, they came upon a nice house in a middle-class neighborhood not far from their own homes. It was about five-thirty in the afternoon, and the victim had obviously just gotten home from work.
“The man whose house had been robbed was very upset,” Watson remembers.
They could see where his sliding glass door had been pried open. It looked like an open-and-shut case of house burglary, one of several the officers had been tracking. But this victim introduced a new wrinkle in the crime spree.
“When we asked him if any belongings were missing from his home, he replied very quickly and indignantly that, yes, somebody had stolen his stash of marijuana. I looked at my partner in disbelief. We couldn’t believe our own ears, so we asked him again just to be sure.
“Could you repeat that, sir?”
The victim’s eyes got bigger as the cold, hard realization hit him. He had just admitted to a police officer that he possessed an illegal drug. He stammered for a moment in search of an out. There was none.
“Are you admitting to possessing marijuana?” the detectives asked. The man appeared to be frozen in time. He couldn’t take the words back, and he couldn’t think of any more to say.
“Sir? Is that what you’re telling us?”
“I . . . uh . . . well, no . . . not really,” the man stammered.
“Well, then, what are you saying?”
“Well . . . nothing, uh . . . I . . . oh, never mind,” the man said. “Just forget it.”
The officers turned and left as the man quietly closed the door, no doubt to sink into a chair and utter some expletives.
“We just left,” Watson says. “Without the dope, we really had no case against the man. But we had a good laugh on the guy. And believe it or not, we’ve had several calls like that one.”