High Time in the Old Town Last Night...

Well, I got home from work yesterday to find an ongoing drama involving a young man who'd escaped from police custody during one of those traffic stops gone complicated. To summarize my impressions from Mrs. Hobie's excited telling of the tale...

Apparently, the Staunton PD made a traffic stop and discovered some marijuana in the car. They went to arrest the two occupants and the passenger twisted away from the officer and ran right down the street over my back fence and through my backyard past my wife and into the front yard. He then doubled back and hid on my front porch as the cops went into the park across the street looking for him. All the neighbors were out but the one on that side of the house saw him crouching on the front porch behind a rocking chair and thought we'd hired painters! Jeez. Anyway, the other neighbors and my wife were also looking but didn't see him up there. He then hopped the railing into my garden and ran back through the backyard, back over the fence and up the street stopping to hide under a trailer where another person saw him but didn't report him.

Meanwhile, my wife found a cartridge he'd dropped on the front porch (which the police took as evidence) leading to speculation that he'd had a gun to go with that cartridge but we've not found the gun (by "we" I mean both us and the police).

Now, this fellow is known by name to the cops and of course his friend/the driver dropped the dime on him. It appears that he knew the penalty for drugs+gun and that is why he ran. Worse yet (?) he's a local high school football player.

This is the third incident we've had in our yard or the street in front of the house in two years. The first was a young (?) man peeping (?) looking for entry and the second was the drive-by shooting (actually shooting into the park but while driving in front of the house). I don't like how this is going. This is not the community it was 20 years ago when we moved here.