Crime & Safety

Dog Takes Car for Joyride, Drunk Driver Goes 110: Best of the Blotter

Here are the strangest police reports in Patch communities from this week.

Here are this week's most bizarre police calls, reports and charges. All information was provided by police reports from departments in Patch communities. Where arrests or charges are mentioned, it does not indicate a conviction.

Westlake: Chauncey's Big Adventure -- 

Yes, this really happened. Chauncey the dog took his master’s 1997 Mercury four door for a short joyride the morning of Aug. 6. The car was parked (running and unoccupied by humans) at a Detroit Road gas station when the cruising canine knocked the shifter into reverse. 

The vehicle backed out of the station southbound, missing the pumps and parked cars, maneuvered a u-turn in traffic, struck a street sign on the north side of the roadway, and came to rest on a stump.

Strongsville: Marijuana Garden -- 

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A gas main break led to the arrest of a Mill Hollow Road man on an unusual drug offense Aug. 5.

Police were called to the street about 10 a.m. when a gas line ruptured. 

But when officers accompanied Columbia Gas workers into the back yard of a nearby home to turn off the resident's gas, they found something more interesting — nine marijuana plants in pots, lined up in the yard.
"The plants were just sitting in the back of the house," Detective Lt. John Janowski said.

The resident told police he was growing the marijuana for medicinal use.

He was nonetheless charged with cultivating drugs, a fourth-degree misdemeanor.

"He'd need to move out of state for that to be legal," Janowski said.

Mentor: Drunk and Flying -- 

Mentor Police arrested a Euclid man early Friday morning for drunk driving and cocaine trafficking.

An officer was driving eastbound on Route 2, near Route 615, around 2:20 a.m. when he saw a car pass him at about 110 miles per hour.  Jeffrey Raleigh, 50, stopped for the officer and had several individual bags of cocaine on him, according to the Mentor Police Department's Facebook page.

Raleigh told police he did not know how the drugs got in his pocket and that he did not see the police cruiser.

Raleigh had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit, according to police.


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