Like most people, I'm a fan of "dumb criminal" stories, in which someone gets busted for being criminally stupid as much as their actual crime. When I came across this story from the Muskegon Chronicle, I found not only stupid criminals, but someone with a surprisingly familiar name...
By Heather Lynn Peters, The Muskegon Chronicle:
MUSKEGON COUNTY — Location, location, location.
One would think two Muskegon-area men might have thought of a better location to smoke dope Monday evening than in the corridor outside the Muskegon County Sheriff's Office Oak Campus, said Undersheriff Dan Stout.
The men were busted around 6:30 p.m. by a deputy who arrived to the Oak Avenue campus, 1611 Oak, Muskegon, to begin his shift, Stout said.
The deputy noticed the two men sitting on the floor “inside the cement corridor leading to our office door,” the deputy stated in a sheriff's office report.
“I walked up to them and asked them what they were doing. The taller, skinny one...stated, 'Smoking weed' and ...handed me some plastic Ziploc baggies that were open and contained a green, leafy substance that appeared and smelled like marijuana,” the deputy stated in the report.
One of the men told the deputy that he bought a gram of marijuana for $20 nearby and they “smoked most of it yesterday” and were planning on “smoking the rest of it today.”
“I asked him if they knew this was a police department, and they both looked at each other in surprise,” the deputy stated in the report, adding that the men told the deputy they “thought it was an old hospital.”
The sheriff's Oak Campus is just south of Mercy Health Partners General Campus — the former Muskegon General Hospital — and formerly housed the county health department.
The building now houses sheriff's detective offices, as well as working space for other law enforcement officials, and Muskegon County Emergency Services.
The other man reluctantly admitted to paying half the cost of the marijuana and said they would have finished smoking the drug Monday “but they were interrupted by my presence,” the deputy said in the report.
The substance believed to be marijuana has been sent to a drug lab for testing, and the two subjects were free to go after they were questioned by the deputy.
However, arrest warrants for both men will be sought by authorities once the test results are back from the lab. An initial “field test” revealed that the substance appears to be marijuana, the report said.
The investigation is ongoing, so authorities declined to release the names of the two men involved.