LEO’s And Lasers And Bears, Oh My!

A busy couple of days in the 24/680 these last 48 hours with spot fires popping up, investigator’s eyebrows going up, handcuffs going on, bad guys acting up and our blood pressure spiking as we try to fit it all in.

Apparently, a good portion of our readership saw some part of an Alamo robbery, brief chase, and possible arrest of as many as three people by sheriff’s deputies on I680 yesterday afternoon and it is absolutely amazing how our Tip Line pulses when these things go down.

We’re hoping to tie that one up in the neat little bundle you folks have come to expect, soon, but we were getting all kinds of excited accounts of the incident – and others – as they unfolded, and we thank all of you who contacted us, out of breath in some cases, to make sure we knew. So, thanks!

And now, a word about helicopters.

By their very design, nothing stirs up public curiosity quite like a million dollar, 1,500-pound assemblage of rotors and engine hovering over your house. There are a lot of them out there: some are law enforcement, some private, some media – and none of them file their flight plans with us before taking to the air.

That said, we have a dedicated corps of pilots and plane spotters among our readership and air jockeys love to talk about their aircraft so we tend to get bits and pieces and accounts of aerial derring-do whenever one is up and overhead.

Our Tip Line pulsed again last night (Tuesday) with accounts of a chopper we believe belonged to the Sheriff of Nottingham, er, the CoCo County Sheriff, orbiting a specific neighborhood in Danville.

We understand one of the Sheriff’s birds was up aiding in a search for an errant juvenile when it may have been “lit up” by someone with a laser aiming the device at the aircraft from the ground. Now, we’re not pilots but pilots we know say they don’t like being blinded by ground-huggers with laser beams – especially when they’re trying to hold a finicky collection of rotors and aviation fuel 2,000 feet up in the air.

Note: The attached video is from an earlier incident involving a sheriff’s chopper.

We’re asking around but we believe contact may have been made with a person suspected of engaging in the light show but we’re not sure if the pilot got to indulge his or her private wish to publicly spank the individual in the street while the neighbors looked on.

The Moral: Don’t blind pilots. Bad. Very bad.

Having our finger on the pulse of things generally around these parts, we would have to say “nervously expectant” if asked: “Can you describe the current mood of the readership in your area?”

People seem to be waiting for something to unfold, perhaps politically – with some key dates looming in that area of interest to be sure – and, also perhaps, financially and personally.

We tend not to gauge these things by events underway in our own private lives (possibly because we have no private lives around here) because we were always taught to stay out of the story and to be sure that others are able to tell theirs, but something definitely feels afoot.

If you feel similarly, and think you know what it is, we’d like to hear your thoughts. Which is why we have a comments window attached to this post.

We’re going to wrap this up, ready for what the day brings and, as we told one law enforcement source we pinged early this morning: “We’re standing by to stand by.”

Let’s see what happens today. We’re hoping it’s not on fire or running from police.