A sharp-eared citizen contacted JCSO dispatch at
about 6 p.m. on Oct. 9 to report a suspicious incident she’d witnessed at
Safeway. She told deputies that, while dropping off a passenger at the
Evergreen Parkway grocery, she observed a girl of possibly 9 years standing on
the sidewalk near the entrance. Suddenly, a 35-ish man wearing a “Little Bear”
T-shirt emerged from the store and, passing by the girl in a suspicious manner,
suspiciously looked down and told her “you look nice.” He then suspiciously
continued into the parking lot, got into his car suspiciously, and suspiciously
drove away. The girl, perhaps stunned by the encounter, waited a few moments
and then wandered back inside. The girl could not be located for interview. The
witness provided officers with the suspicious man’s license plate number, but a
check with dispatch turned up nothing suspicious.

At about 2 o’clock in the a.m., a deputy pulled over a gray Volkswagen with Oklahoma plates after it wandered over a double-yellow on Brook Forest Road and nearly joined him in the front seat of his patrol car. The talkative young lady behind the wheel sloppily explained that she was merely headed home from her bartending shift at an elegant Kittredge restaurant. Since her shift ended at 10 p.m. and her breath was stripping the finish off his badge, the officer wondered if maybe she’d used the 4-hour interval to knock back a few, or a few dozen. “I’m not going to say anything because I don’t want to incriminate myself,” she barely pronounced, right before launching into a rambling explanation about how she’d spent the time doing “paperwork, employee evaluations, etcetera, etcetera.” As luck would have it, a noble Samaritan sporting Georgia plates and claiming to manage her place of work stopped at the scene. He explained that he was “following her to make sure she got home safely,” although he couldn’t explain how following in a separate vehicle ensured anything besides a good view to her misfortune. On the way down to Jeffco’s lock-up, the synthetically emotional woman ran by turns hostile and sarcastic, surly and depressed, and loudly musical. On arrival, she sought to confound her tormentor by standing board-stiff just outside the door, but he artfully countered by physically dragging her into the booking office and citing her for driving while high as an elephant’s eye.