Jury Duty
Ok, this one’s long, so you might want to “open frame in new window”…
Jury duty was interesting. Case was about two guys that carjacked a delivery truck. The driver and his friend were making a delivery at the Beverly Center and two guys show up, one with a shotgun, and want to take the truck. So one bad guy stays in the back of the truck with the driver’s friend, and the other bad guy (w/shotgun) tells the driver to close the back of the truck and guides him around to make him drive. (note: if you close the back of the truck, it latches and can’t be opened from the inside…) So bad guy w/shotgun puts the driver in the drivers seat and has him start the truck (bad guy is still standing outside), then bad guy walks around the front of the truck to get in the passenger side. As he gets to the far right corner, the driver floors it and tries to ram him into the wall. Unfortunately, the fender is too big, so bad guy starts climbing into the truck. But, he does so by reaching onto the seat with his left hand, which is holding the shotgun, to pull himself up. So, the driver grabs the gun with one hand while steering with the other. Meanwhile, the truck is moving into traffic. The bad guy fights with the driver a bit, while the driver is swerving around to shake the bad guy up. Finally, the driver stops the truck, grabs the shotgun, and slams the guy into the passenger door with it. Then he grabs the keys and runs. He bolts down toward the back of the truck and throws the security latch so the truck can’t be opened without a key, and runs off behind a telephone pole down the street. The truck is, at this point, stopped in the middle of an intersection. The bad guy gets out, tries to get his friend out of the back of the truck but can’t, so he leaves the shotgun in the truck and runs off. Driver then goes and calls the police.
The police show up, block off the street, and evacuate the restaurants (they don’t know if the other bad guy is armed or not). The driver remembers that he’d left his cell phone in the back of the truck, so the police call the other bad guy and ask him to surrender. He says ok, so they crack open the back of the truck and have both guys stick their hands out, cuff ‘em both, and get them out.
So, the trial has the driver on the witness stand and the guy he’s previously picked from a photo line-up on trial. the key question comes around, just like on TV: Can you point out the man with the shotgun here in this courtroom today? The guy looks around and says, “no, I don’t think he’s here”…
They settled the case the next day…
But it gets weirder… Turns out that the driver was from Balise, and had gone there a few years ago to sell a car (another juror explained later this means he’d stolen it), and he needed a ride back up. So a relative hooked him up with someone who was driving back to LA. Turns out this was the father of the guy accused of being the carjacker… And, all four involved (driver, his friend, and the two bad guys) were all from Balise.
Interesting coincidence?
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