Please disregard that insensitive, clickbait headline. I misspelled the sentence: “Jacksonville Citizens Apprehended for Illegally Acquiring Communications Equipment.” Simple mistake.
Anyway, according to Jacksonville.com, Blake Lee Waller, 42, and Victor Walter Apeler, 46, were arrested in Jacksonville, Fla., Wednesday morning when cops stopped two men with a telephone pole perched atop their vehicle as if they were preparing for a medieval SUV jousting match.
After the encounter, the Jacksonville County Sheriff’s Office tweeted out this picture:
A 911 caller alerted the officers to the suspicious activity when she recognized that Jacksonville Electrical Authority workers don’t usually drive Kia Sorentos and work bare-chested. The cops said the men tried to explain that they were just helping move it out of the street. Sheriff’s officers spotted the hole where the pole belonged, and when they were asked why the pole was on top of their car, the alleged thieves didn’t have an answer.
Wrong.
We would have accepted any of the following answers:
- “I’m putting up a basketball goal, and it might not look like it, but I have a really high vertical leap.”
- We were actually rescuing this telephone pole and taking it to the local pole shelter to find a good home for it.”
- “You know what they say: ‘Poles before holes!’”
- “We’re building a log cabin for the homeless.”
Or most impressively:
- “Why you always bringing up pole shit?”
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office later discovered that Apeler had 73 transactions with local pawn shops this year alone, 72 of them for scrap metal. The poles are valued at $2,500.
Read more at Jacksonville.com,