Posted on 10/18/2010 6:12:23 AM PDT by SonOfDarkSkies
CHELSEA — Only in Vermont would a device designed to track the comings-and-goings of wildlife in the woods be deployed to crack a chronic case of pilfered political signs.
A trail cam on the campaign trail?
Ayuh!
Just ask Assistant Judge Maurice “Mo” Brown, who can’t stop chuckling about how well the idea he cooked up with the help of his son, Scott, worked last week.
“You couldn’t have hired someone to do that and have it come out any better,” Brown says.
Now he has the briefest of black-and-white videos that shows a man he isn’t yet prepared to name snatching two campaign signs from a secluded section of his property on Upper Village Road in Chelsea.
“He walked right where he was supposed to walk, he faced right where he was supposed to face, and he looked just how he was supposed look,” Brown says.
How’s that?
Guilty, according to the judge.
“You talk about the ‘deer in the headlights?’ Boy, I’ll tell you that was it,” Brown says.
In fact, the video, which his son posted on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GULvp284u4Q), shows a man, with a campaign sign in each of his hands, who appears to freeze momentarily when he spots the camera, and then walks off with the signs shielding his face.
It’s funny and then again it’s not, according to Brown, who says he met with Orange County Sheriff Bill Bohnyak and one of his deputies on Friday and hasn’t yet decided how to proceed.
“I haven’t made up my mind,” he says.
“We’ll see,” he says. “If we do nothing it’s not going to stop.”
The other half of the “we” to whom Brown is referring is Orange County’s other assistant judge, Prudence Pease.
In a rare, and some might say surprising, move, Brown, a Republican, says he and Pease, a Democrat-turned-Independent, are “running as a team” and the signs taken from his land last week – the ones that say: “Brown and Pease: Working Together” – have been turning up missing at an alarming rate.
“We’ve lost over a dozen signs,” he says.
The man caught on camera taking the last two sat at his kitchen table Friday apologizing and insisting that he was simply moving them to what he believed was a more prominent location.
Brown isn’t buying it.
“If he wanted one of our signs all he had to do was ask,” says Brown.
Pease, who was at the heart of a two-year controversy that ended when she received what amounted to a slap on the wrist from the Judicial Conduct Board last summer, says her signs started disappearing even before the new ones touting her alliance with Brown were delivered.
“Keeping my signs out there has been a challenge,” she says. “It’s been very frustrating.”
According to Pease, the problem didn’t abate when the new signs finally arrived.
“We have the most sought after signs in Orange County,” she says. “Sometimes if we put a sign out at 5 p.m. it doesn’t make it to the next morning … when the sun comes up, the sign is gone.”
According to Brown, the signs taken in the video were “pegged” to the ground with lawn staples and positioned well back from the road so both were in range of his trusty trail cam. They were taken Wednesday evening at precisely 8:06 p.m.
An avid hunter, he spent Sunday afternoon carving up a deer he bagged earlier this month.
“We’re hunters,” he says. “We use these cameras all the time … and we figured if they work for deer why wouldn’t they work for humans?”
Pease says she is “amazed at Judge Brown’s initiative.”
“The fact that he actually caught someone in the act is incredible,” she says.
Although there was a time not all that long ago that Brown and Pease weren’t even on speaking terms, Brown says those days are now a distant memory. He describes Pease as “as fine a judge as there is in this state.”
“I respect her (Pease) and I would like to continue to work with her,” he says. “I think she’s an asset to Orange County.”
As for those who steal signs with the once-controversial judge’s name on them?
“They’re living in the past,” Brown says, noting that they are also breaking the law.
“It’s not a major penalty, but if you steal one of Brown and Pease’s signs you may be on camera,” he says. “We’ve got more of them (trail cams) out there.”
The other two candidates running for assistant judge in Orange County this year are Democrats Joyce McKeeman of Corinth and Victoria Weiss of Royalton.
david.delcore@timesargus.com
oh my dawg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that is hilarious
lol
I was sure this was an Onion piece, but lol, it is for real, and all the funnier :)
Thank you for the laughter,
May God bless.
Tatt
OOps, must fo picked the wrong day to stop stealing signs.....
I was moving them so someone wouldn't steal them............
My brother in law had a similar problem in his neighborhood until he put up one political sign with another one that said, “If you steal my sign again, I will shoot you.”
Is anyone surprised at this. The Dim Dems are all liars, cowards and theives.
Thx RB!
If he was moving the signs to a more prominent place, why cover your face with the signs?
Busted.
In 2004 we had a problem with someone taking our Bush signs. We ended up putting pine tar on the edges of the signs. One morning we found a sign laying down on the grass, apparently having been thrown by the thief. We chuckled about the cleanup problem he had, especially if he touched his clothes.
I just rub my signs with poison ivy. Then watch to see which neighbor is covered in Calamine Lotion. It was the kid next door in 2008.
A lot of us don’t have problems with poison ivy, course we don’t steal campaign signs either.
....they have a tube of cream that you can smear on anything..
it goes on clear but turns a bright blue when it’s on your skin that you can not wash off for weeks.........
Last Verifiable Photo of Endangered Liberal Before Mass Extinction Event
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