Posted on 02/16/2008 2:29:21 AM PST by kingattax
Hayward police and federal investigators did the grunt work, and it paid off:
They tracked down and arrested a cell phone caller believed to have phoned the emergency 911 number more than 27,000 times making bodily noises, muttering in a disguised voice, and pressing the beep tone.
On Wednesday night, police arrested John Triplette, 45, of Hayward on suspicion of abusing the 911 emergency line, a misdemeanor punishable by $1,000 fine and/or six months in jail.
"He completely overwhelmed our system," said Desi Calzada, manager of the Hayward Communications Center, which operates 911. "He delayed the answering of other 911 calls because we were answering his."
It all started last May, when the California Highway Patrol's communication center in Vallejo began receiving copious 911 calls from a mysterious caller using a T-Mobile cell phone. Over a seven-month period, the caller placed 17,000 calls to the CHP.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
That shouldn’t have taken this long to track down.
With 27,000 violations, that would add up to $27,000,000 in fines and/or 13,500 years in jail. Sounds about right!
Triplette told police, "Because it's free."
The calls maybe free but he's not.
I'm not quite sure why the police are patting themselves on the back here. It took nine months to track him down, and apparently the guy was calling from his home, on a T-Mobile phone.
They have the calling number through caller ID. With the number they know who owns the phone.
They could have easily done something about it after the first few days.
Again, something doesn’t make sense about this story.
Especially amusing, since you (supposedly) can’t disable caller ID on a cell phone when you call 911. And the system automatically tries to locate you to determine which 911 district to transfer you to.
All they needed was a court order, this article makes them look incompetent.
>>>>Again, something doesn’t make sense about this story.
Agreed, but remember, it’s California. Nothing makes sense there.
If he was smart he would have used an old cell phone with no service. The 911 is the only thing that works.
But then if he was smart he would have taken up a new hobby.
Police have been gradually muzzled by rules of the courtroom evolved through lawyering: defending themselves in the same article is often impossible. (Excluding the police side of the story assures sales of newspapers).
"Incompetent" may describe one who didn't know of inactivated cell phones! ;-)
Yeah. That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Either there's something missing from this story, some important detail, or California's 9/11 system needs fixed, badly
It took them 7 months to find this joker?
The authorities weren’t doing their jobs. Makes perfect sense to me.
This guy is sick, sick, sick. Why'd it take so long to catch him?
I recall reading about this some time ago - the phone was one given out by of those those “donate your old phones to the homeless” charities and somehow was not linked to any name or address that could be traced.
Bodily noises? What could those be? ;-)
The police were busy writing numbers on bullets.
Isn't that per incident? Fine him $27 million. Why did it take more than five or ten calls before he was arrested?
Throw away cell phone are available that aren’t registered to anyone. One purchases such phones with a set number of minutes and either throws the phone away when those are used or purchases more minutes to be used.
Hey I live in California. You're right.
Regards
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