Madmen, I give you two cases of April Fool’s Day pranks gone horribly wrong.
In Tomball, TX Police responded to a call from a woman reporting a robbery at a pub where her mother worked. The woman received a text from her mother, Tina Osterloh saying that she was being held up. The daughter frantically called police and they arrived on the scene with patrol units, administrators, The Chief of police and even a gyro-plane. They arrested an unlucky customer who happened to wander into the pub looking for a lost cellular phone.
It all turned out to be part of a April Fool’s Day prank between Mother Tina Osterloh and her daughter who was also the manager of the pub. The customer was released and no charges were filed against Osterloh.
In Cleveland, Ohio an employee of Cleveland’s Building and Housing Department called her boyfriend and told him that shots had been fired inside City Hall. The boyfriend called 911. Several officers responded to the call of shots being fired at 601 Lakeside avenue before they received word that the call was a prank. Rhodia Wallace,30 was arrested for inducing panic and making false alarms.
Both women showed poor judgment and an extremely warped sense of humor. But, in Wallace’s case she was arrested while Osterloh simply lost her job. I will not belittle the fact that both cases could have caused someone to be hurt or possibly killed. Both cases exhausted the resources of area police and essentially wasted the time of law enforcement officers who could have been responding to legitimate calls for help.
The MadMan Chronicles 