The Burglar Who Fell Asleep

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

You know how I feel about thieves. I’ve made that quite clear already in a previous post. That’s not to say that I haven’t known one or two in my time. In fact one of my long time friends, way back from primary school days turned into a thief in later life.

His name was Terry. He was just a little guy, but reasonably bright. Not a star at school by any means but he did okay, passed all his exams and went on to a good quality high school.

That’s when it all started to go wrong for Terry. He was fond of a good time and did his share of parties and other social gatherings. That’s where he got introduced to and seduced by the drug scene. Like many people his addiction started out with smoking a little ‘pot’. A lot of people have done that, out of curiosity mainly just to see what it is like, and that’s as far as it goes. They do the same with cigarettes, try them, but again never get hooked on the habit.

But Terry wasn’t so lucky. His venture with ‘pot’ led him, as it has led many others, to experiment with stronger, and much more addictive drugs and eventually Terry developed a habit that needed a lot of money to support it.

That’s when the thieving started. All petty stuff. He was not prone to violence in any way, shape or form. It was all just opportunist crimes and most of the time he got away with it.

On one particular occasion, however, he was in a fairly bad way and desperately needed a ‘fix’. He could have gone his usual route and stolen something, or some money, but this time he thought he had a ‘better idea’, one that would short-circuit the normal ‘steal-sell-buy’ route that got him the money he needed to buy the drugs.

The ‘better idea’ was breaking into a pharmacy where he might find a little money, but he would definitely find some drugs. And that’s what he did. In the early hours one Sunday morning Terry broke into his local pharmacy. Sure enough he found what he was looking for and he loaded up his pockets with lots of different pills.

In normal circumstances, if he had just left it at that, he might have got away with it, for a while anyway. But, as I said earlier, he was in a fairly bad way and desperately needed a ‘fix’.

And that’s just what he did. He opened a box of pills that he had lifted and gulped a few down there and then.

You’ve probably guessed already that the pills he took were the wrong ones. In his haste to ‘get well’ Terry had mistakenly opened and swallowed a load of some kind of tranquilizer.

That’s why the police, who had been alerted by the silent alarm in the pharmacy, found Terry fast asleep on the floor behind the counter. He didn’t waken up for another fifteen hours! The medical report later said something like, “he had taken enough to down a thoroughbred stallion”, and as I mentioned Terry was a smallish bloke.

Of course, when he wakened up and was released from hospital he was duly charged with burglary. A while later he appeared in court and was sentenced to several months in jail. It should have bee a Godsend for him. Cut off from his supplies, and the money to buy them, he went ‘cold turkey’ and managed to get himself off the drugs. When he was released he was ‘clean’. It was the opportunity he needed to restart his life, the second chance that most of us never have.

For a while he did well, stayed ‘clean’ and even got himself a steady job. Now he had money in his pockets and, because every penny wasn’t being blown on drugs, he could rent a decent apartment, buy himself good clothes, eat well, get all the tv, radio, hi-fi, and other things that we all surround ourselves with.   

But the story for my friend Terry hasn’t got a happy ending I’m afraid. There must be a destructive gene in some people that makes them impossible to save. Despite the quality of his life being so much better without his drug habit, something happened – I don’t know what – and he started using again. Soon he was back to his old ways. He lost all his new found possessions, all sold to raise money to pay the drug dealers.

Eventually, maybe eighteen months or a couple of years later Terry was found dead in his apartment, the victim of a drug overdose.

I hadn’t seen him for a long time before his death, but I had kept a passing interest and heard about some of his activities from other friends who lived in his town. I was sorry when I eventually found out his fate. It was such a waste.

Maybe a warning to others? I hope so.

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Can’t leave my blog like that of course. Have to end on a lighter note.

How about this bunch of morons?

There was the guy who went into a drug store in Baltimore, pulled a gun, announced a robbery, and pulled a "Hefty-bag" face mask over his head. He then realized that he'd forgotten to cut eyeholes in the mask. He was arrested by security men.

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Or the Belgian genius who when questioned by police about robbing a jewellery store in Liege said he couldn't have done it because he was busy breaking into a school at the same time.
Police then arrested him for breaking into the school. Duhhh!

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Then there were the two men who tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off their truck.

Scared, they left the scene and drove home... With the chain still attached to the machine... With their bumper still attached to the chain... With their vehicle's license plate still attached to the bumper. You couldn't make it up!

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On a Seattle street a man attempted to siphon petrol from a motor home parked there. But he got a lot more than he bargained for.

Police arrived at the scene to find an ill man curled up next to a motor home. Quickly following the scent of this crime, they discovered that in trying to steal gasoline from the Motor home’s gas tank, this idiot had actually plugged his hose into the motor home's sewage tank by mistake.

The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges, saying that it was the best laugh he'd ever had.

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And finally, while Investigating a purse snatching, police detectives picked up a man who fit the thief's description and drove him back to the scene. He was told to exit the car and face the victim for an ID. The suspect carefully eyed the victim, and shouted, 'Yeah, that's the woman I robbed.'

Have you had similar experiences? Send them along. Let the world know what is happening before it is too late.