Recently, my hometown of Evansville, Indiana became part of the national news cycle when a wanted felon was apprehended here after a dramatic car chase. Did you hear about it? The felon had escaped his jail in Alabama with the aid of a guard-turned-girlfriend, instigating a nation-wide search for both of them. Right cheer in Evanspatch, our police force made a heroic effort to nab the felon, thus saving untold lives and Evansville from becoming a brunt of a media Barney Fife joke.
There were many facts about the escapee that got my attention, among them the fact that he was 6’9” tall. That is not just tall, that is approaching Biblical proportions, and we know what happened to a lot of giants in the Bible. Our unwanted “wanted” Alabama visitor made a last-ditch effort to escape and appropriately ended up in a ditch and eventually back behind bars.
Granted, there are some things that make me cringe about our town. I sometimes wish we would really clean up our littered streets, beef up our local commercials, and stop carrying grills around in our pick-up trucks, but this time we got it right. Our police were on this criminal faster than a hound flea, avoiding what surely would have been a very ugly and lethal shoot-out.
Still, I was left with some perplexing, if not slightly odd missing pieces from our local drama. With all due respect to the Redneck Riviera, I’d like to revisit the crime scene, and ask a few questions…
- Why wasn’t this XXXX-Large criminal ever given a basketball in school when he showed signs of veering from the straight and narrow? As a side item, I’d like to comment that he looked rather good in bright orange, which fits the color schemes sported by most pro basketball teams nowadays.
- Why did he get out of his car while it was in the middle of a car wash? We know in their hearts, all criminals want to come clean, but that’s going too far.
- What are the chances that a law enforcement officer named “White” would hook up with an unrelated criminal by the same name, and then seal their pre-nuptials by an early honeymoon?
- Why did this felon risk being seen, and therefore caught, by driving on one of the busiest thoroughfares through Alabama? When I travel that route coming back from Florida, I’m caught in traffic jams every twenty miles starting with the Choctawhatchee Bridge, then Montgomery, followed by Birmingham, Huntsville, and around downtown Nashville.
- What enticed the fugitive couple to hang around Evansville for six days? Even the law enforcement officers are stuck on this one. I suspect they became addicted, like a lot of us here, on the 831 fast food choices available throughout our fare city.
Well, we may never know the answer to any of these questions, and I won’t be looking for them on any episode of Law and Order, either. I’ll be going about my business, getting my car washed at Mike’s, and eating a cream filled Long John at Donut Bank, and feeling a bit safer than I did before. Thank you EPD!