Chattanooga Pulse

A weekly roundup of the newsworthy, notable and often head-scratching stories gleaned from police reports from the Chattanooga Police Department, the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, the Bradley County Sheriff’s Department and the Dalton Police Department.

• On television and in the movies, police SWAT teams have been glorified for their daring raids to end a tense situation. The reality is often not far from what we’ve seen on the screen, both big and small.  After a 63-year-old woman barricaded herself in her Fifth Avenue residence with a small arsenal of weapons, a hostage negotiator patiently spent more than three hours trying to talk the woman out of the house.  Finally, SWAT team members deployed tear gas into the house and were able to take the woman into custody peacefully and without anyone getting hurt. The woman was charged with “discharging a weapon”.

• Someone really likes the clothes sold at a popular clothing retailer at Northgate Mall. Since May of last year, the same man—who has been dubbed “The Clothes Bandit”—has been making regular “snatch and run” raids on the store, the most recent heist involving ten women’s dresses.  Store security officials say the man walks into the store, grabs a rack of clothes, then sprints out the nearest exit.  It is estimated that he has purloined more than $10,000 worth of clothing and other merchandise in just the past three months.

• We’ve written before about knowing when a relationship is over and moving on. And yet, some lovelorn individuals just don’t seem to understand that no matter what they do, they are not going to convince the object of their desire to change their mind.  In fact, urging makes it far more unlikely.  Which is why leaving a fishing pole on the front porch of a former boyfriend—who ended the relationship more than 17 months ago—resulted not in him wanting to get back together but instead in him calling the police.  However, attaching a home address to the end of the pole did help officers in tracking down the ex-girlfriend, who hopefully will finally come to the understanding that her romantic future involves someone new.

• Ask any detective and they’ll tell you that criminals are not always the brightest bulb in the box.  Example: the man who had stolen three pairs of socks, some batteries and two pairs of sunglasses from a Market Street discount store.  Instead of being happy with the successful haul, he then decided to continue his one-man crime spree by heading to a nearby grocery store to see what he could add to his growing collection of stolen merchandise.  However, as police were already in the area in response to the first theft, he was quickly taken into custody after attempting to shoplift two pieces of barbecue.  The thought process behind stealing socks, batteries, sunglasses and barbecue was bit easier to understand when it was discovered that the man had identification from a mental-health facility in Washington, D.C.