Streaking part of officers’ anecdotes
A bag with two human hands in it – one right and one left – lay atop the Engineering Building, and a member of Facilities located the bag and notified USU Police, said Capt. Steve Milne while recalling a true story of an experience he had years ago.
“We thought, ‘Well, there’s no way it can be human hands, there has to be an explanation,'” Milne said. “And we got up there, and sure enough, there was a right and a left hand – nice, clean cuts made at the wrists.”
Milne said police figured the hands must have come from the cadaver lab or could’ve been some sort of prank. He said the cadaver lab, however, reported it had all of its hands accounted for. At that point USU Police contacted area law enforcement to see if any of them were investigating a “dismemberment or missing body parts.”
“We were taking them down to the crime lab to see if they could help us,” Milne said. “The best they could tell was that they were – I believe they said – female, and older. Beyond that, they couldn’t tell us anything.”
A day or two later, Milne said, a graduate student working on a project regarding artificial knuckles came forward to claim the missing mitts.
The student had reportedly gotten the hands on loan from a local doctor for research purposes, and Milne said instead of keeping them in the department refrigerator, the student would climb out on the roof and leave the hands there during the winter. The student ended up feeling somewhat sheepish, but Milne said nothing could be done legally.
“Unless you’ve got a crime to tie it to, you’re kind of left holding a bag of hands,” he said.
It’s likely that most cops have stories they’ll remember – things that break up the monotony of walking the beat, riding on patrol or typing up reports at a desk – but Milne and fellow USU police agreed it’s not every day a pair of actual human hands is found.
However, medical incidents occur all the time, and USU Police Sgt. Trevor Dunn, who used to work for Logan City Police, said in 1988 he and a fellow Logan officer responded to a dispatch regarding a drunk, middle-aged man who was passed out in downtown Logan.
“We pull up there and there was an intoxicated male, passed out, and I looked in his eyes to see if they were responsive, opened it up and it was fixed,” Dunn said. “I said, ‘We need to get this guy to the hospital,’ and … it was before you called the ambulance out for transport.”
Dunn said he and his partner loaded the man into the back seat of their squad car.
“We folded his legs up and took off to the hospital,” he said. “We got to the hospital, pulled him out of the car and were throwing him up on the gurney, and we missed the gurney and he rolls off the other side.”
Ultimately the officers were able to transport the man to the emergency room to be seen by a doctor. The reason the man’s eye seemed so unresponsive is because it was a prosthetic, or “glass eye,” Dunn said.
Body parts, real and artificial, seem to be the subject of many anecdotes police officers remember.
Officer Kim Ellis, who’s worked for USU Police for about 10 years, said he formerly worked as a cop in Rexburg, Idaho, at Ricks College – before it became BYU-Idaho. While there, he said the biology department reported a full skeleton, made of human bones, missing.
“While I was interviewing (the suspect) I said, ‘Where’s the skeleton?'” Ellis said. “And he goes, ‘Well, it’s buried in the snow next to one of the buildings,’ and I go, ‘Why’d you bury it in the snow?'”
The student explained that he thought it would be funny for someone to find a skeleton in the grass after the snow melted, Ellis said. Unfortunately for the student, he said, the theft was a felony case since the cost of the skeleton exceeded $1000, which resulted in one somewhat expensive prank.
Pranks are not all considered criminal acts; cops engage in pranks frequently, too, Dunn said, and his colleague Officer Andy Barnes agreed. Barnes said he lay in wait, crouching in another officer’s locker for at least 20 minutes so he could jump out and scare the officer when he came in for his shift.
“It was the morning we also had apparently a 12-alarm fire at the Bio-tech (Building),” Barnes said. “Come to find out he was only coming on at 7 o’clock … but this was like 5:40 when I got into his locker. At like five to 6, I get a fire alarm call and I’m inside his locker. It never happened. It was quite embarrassing.”
Other pranks go off without a hitch, though, such as the time Dunn said he salvaged a driver’s-side car window from a local body shop. He said he took the window with him to a location at which a rookie officer had responded to a call. While the officer was indoors, Dunn used his own universal car key to unlock the squad car and roll the window down.
“We’re really good at pulling jokes,” he said. “I pulled the glass out right next to (his car) and break it and shatter it, so half of it goes in the car and half of it is on the ground. Then we (stole) all his computers and radars, and then we opened his trunk and put all his stuff in his own trunk and then we leave.”
Dunn said he was the officer in charge that night, so shortly after he fled the scene of his prank, he received a nervous call from the new officer, who seemed afraid to say anything in detail regarding the fact that his squad car had just been burglarized.
In some cases cop cars actually do incur damage – not just in the movies but in pleasant Logan, Utah.
Officer Travis Robson of USU Police said in 2008 he responded to a call of a bank robbery in progress, and in the process of securing the perimeter he found two 18-year-old suspects fleeing the area. Robson said he accidentally smashed his car into the getaway vehicle, which caused about $5,000 in damage to Robson’s vehicle.
“I hauled butt down there and … I shot my vehicle across the parking lot,” Robson said. “I realized I (was) going a little quick, so I started braking, and he shot the gap between me and the bushes and we (crashed).”
Robson said in the years he’s worked for USU Police he’s responded to calls of sheep in reside
nce halls, peeping-tom gorillas and students sledding in their underwear.
Barnes said he recently discovered four male students, wearing nothing but tennis shoes and “sitting butts to nuts” on the back of the Aggie Bull near the Spectrum parking lot – a pursuit some students refer to as becoming “ultimate Aggies.” Police can neither confirm or deny whether 24-hour surveillance is trained on the bull, but officers have said they’ve responded to several similar calls.
Nudity is unequivocally against the law, according to Milne, and there are several charges one might acquire, such as disrupting a university event or disorderly conduct, if he or she defrocks in public. Such is the case of the streaker that made it across the court at an Aggie basketball game in 1993 before being clotheslined by an officer on duty.
Having apprehended all sorts of suspects, from streakers to Santa’s helpers, cavemen, clowns and individuals under the influence of every substance under the sun – whether putting people in handcuffs or finding a pair of hands – several USU Police officers agree, there are definitely some interesting stories to tell.
– dan.whitney.smith@aggiemail.usu.edu