Miscellaneous

Next stop, crazy town

Eighteen-year-old James Harris is fucking weird. Apparently, he made friends with several transit employees because he is, as an assistant director for Miami bus operations describes him, "a real transit freak." He used this friendship to get an actual bus driver uniform and then in early June, he took advantage of owning this uniform:

On June 1st, wearing an employee's hat low over his face and a pair of sunglasses, Harris was able to bypass security at a transit depot and steal a bus.

Harris, dressed in his smart-looking uniform, then spent the next few hours driving the bus down its actual route, picking up passengers along the way. He collected fares, drove the speed limit, and dropped passengers off at their stops.

At the end of his "shift," Harris returned the undamaged bus to the depot. Police have no indication that he kept any of the fares. Nor did any of his passengers complain.

The teen was later caught and charged with burglary and grand theft.

But this takes place in Florida, and the story, so far, just doesn't reach the heights of Florida-worthy bizarre. But the fact that Harris did this again, two weeks after being released on bail? Yeah, that gets us there. This time, he took the bus on a thirty mile trip, and it's unclear whether he picked up fares this time. But it is clear, thanks to a security camera, that at one point Harris pulled the bus over to the side of a road and hopped out to make out with another man. While the cops eventually found the bus, Harris had vanished like a fart in the wind and hasn't been heard from or seen since.

The assistant director for bus operations says that Harris is "totally dreaming at this point -- he's fantasizing he's a bus operation, he wants to be one so bad." Which of course begs the question, why go through all this rather than just applying to be a bus driver? The answer, of course, is that things in Florida don't go from A to B to C. They go from A to Purple to Steak.

(Hat tip to the Blawg Review's anonymous editor.)

Full post as published by Quiz Law on July 30, 2008 (boomark / email).