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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Taser a raccoon and you only make him angry |
| 2007-10-04 |
| Memo to officers: Taser a raccoon and you only make him angry Terrified, Theresa Griffin heard something coming up the stairs from the finished basement of her South Pearl Street home. "I thought someone was coming up the stairs. It scared the heck out of me," she said. She called Janesville police about 12:45 a.m. Wednesday. An officer came and searched the home. No intruder. Nothing suspicious. About 20 minutes later, Griffin headed to bed on the house's upper level. She found a mess of blackberries smashed on her bed. '"What the heck! Then I thought maybe my house is haunted, a poltergeist or something." Griffin called the cops again. The officer returned and asked if Griffin had any berries in the house. No. Was she having problems with anyone? Somebody in Nevada owed her money. The officer thought the intruder might still be in the home. He was right. A masked bandit lurked. "As I was searching the lower section of the basement, I looked underneath a bed and came face to face with a raccoon," he reported. He figured the raccoon puked the blackberries on the bed. But the adventure was just beginning. The officer called his supervisor, who brought an animal control noose and backup: two more cops. "The ordeal eventually involved four officers and became quite a task to capture the raccoon," the officer reported. "The Keystone Kops, that's what it was," Griffin said of the two-hour try to catch the critter. The officers had a good attitude about their hot pursuit, Griffin said. "They said they might need a little more training at it." The reporting officer wrote: "Officers learned that the Tasers do not work on raccoons. The Taser deployment on the raccoon only appeared to anger the raccoon. Â… This was very large raccoon, and he did run around the bedroom several times and cornered officers at one point." In fact, the raccoon-"One officer said, 'That's a small bear,'" Griffin recalled-cornered the cops twice, charged a couple of times and knocked down three officers at once. Eventually able to lasso the rambunctious raccoon, officers set it free outside-without charges or a court date. Griffin has no idea how it got in. "I'm a huge door-locker," she said. "I want to write a letter to thank those cops. They were here for quite some time." By Mike DuPre' mdupre@gazetteextra.com (Published Thursday, October 4, 2007 11:51:42 AM CST) |
| Posted by:Mullah Richard |