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
I saw it, I just wondered why it let the video roll on long after the squirrel, I mean, dude, was gone.
If someone can insert a pic of Howard Dean, we can probably get it on the front page of the Burlington Free Press.;-)
I had that problem in 2004.
Cured it by pouring concrete anchors to tie the sign supports to.
hmmmm. . .guess I should have thought of poison ivy or the blue cream instead of wrapping the signs in my yard with barbed wire. Oh, well. It worked.
This is a decades-old Democrat tactic.
I hate to admit it, but when I was a young boy (about six) a close relative (a lifelong Democrat) used to drive me out into the countryside at night and send me out of the car to vandalize and remove the Republican campaign signs and billboards.
Thank you! Absolutely Priceless :)
Tatt
Judge Brown and the authorities have decided not to press charges since the news coverage and humiliation it has heaped on the offending party have been more than sufficient to deter future sign thieves.
Kudos to Judge Mo Brown and son Scott for a job well done!
All twenty (or 25? it’s been a long time) of the Bush-Cheney signs I put up were removed and replaced with Kerry-Edwards ones back in ‘04. The weasels even stole the holes, which in Virginia red clay is no joke. When I went back to the local R HQ for more signs, they said several thousand had been stolen from all over the county. I considered marking the second set with “One of these signs is protected by shotgun. Guess which.”
... OMG!! what a clever idea... instant retribution and a lasting reminder.... LOL
ymmv
I asked him, “Joe! Where’d ya get that poison ivy?” He said, “I don’t know.” I smiled at him real big, turned around and walked away. Being a teenaged boy, he probably had rash in places that you and I wouldn’t get a rash. Hope so!
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