Police beat: False names, a lost phone and shouting in traffic

Editor’s note: Compiled from reports to Tacoma police.

Feb. 22: The man gave a false name, and he carried a bag full of more names, none of which belonged to him.

The dispatch call started as a routine check on a loitering complaint. Officers drove to an apartment complex in the 700 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

They found the man hanging out in a stairwell between the third and fourth floors, fiddling with a mobile phone and a green credit card, leaning over a small orange bag. A woman was with him.

Did the pair live in the complex? No, they said — they were visiting a friend on the fourth floor.

What was the man’s name? He gave one, along with a date of birth. It didn’t match the name on the green credit card.

Officers detained the man and read him his rights twice. Twice he said he didn’t understand. They looked through his wallet and found five Social Security cards, along with picture ID of the man, with a different name than the one he’d given.

That name attached to active arrest warrants. The man was 47. Officers looked through the orange bag and found 10 driver’s licenses; none belonged to the man. The stash in the bag also included checks that looked washed, and financial mail, none of it addressed to the man.

The man said the bag wasn’t his.

Subsequent inquiry into the pieces of identification led to an assortment of people who lived near the man’s listed address. One piece of picture ID, a driver’s license that expired in 2003, belonged to a woman who had dated the man and separated from him four years earlier.

Other people contacted by officers said they had lost a purse, a wallet and various pieces of mail, including yet-to-be activated credit cards.

Officers booked the man into the Pierce County Jail. He was subsequently charged with multiple counts of identity theft.

Feb. 22: The man banging on the door was single-minded, but less than perceptive.

Shortly before 11 p.m., officers drove to a house in the 700 block of South Mullen Street. The caller said the man had been pounding on the door for half an hour.

Officers spoke to him. He was 48, red-faced and water-eyed, with liquor on his breath.

Did he live here?

“No, I’m here for my phone,” the man said thickly.

Inside, a woman said she had been visiting the man’s house a few doors down a little earlier in the day, left and stopped here at her mother’s place. The man had followed, she said, drunken and demanding his phone.

The woman said she didn’t have the phone and didn’t know where it was. She had asked the man to leave, but he’d refused.

Officers tried calling the man’s number from inside the house. They found nothing. They offered to file a report of a stolen phone, but the man wouldn’t have it. He said the woman was a liar and that she had the phone.

Officers told the man to leave or face arrest for trespassing. The man agreed. Officers left the scene.

An hour later, they came back. The man had returned to pounding on the door, the mother said, forcing another emergency call.

“I just want my phone,” the man said.

Officers tried to negotiate and told the man to stay home, get some sleep and work out the problem in the morning. The man agreed. They returned to the mother’s house and explained.

As they talked, the man returned and stood in the front yard.

“I want my phone,” he said.

Officers booked the man into the Pierce County Jail on suspicion of criminal trespassing.

Feb. 20: Cars swerved around the shouting man who lurched onto the exit ramp of I-705 at the entrance to Stadium Way.

At 11:35 p.m., two officers drove to the area, answering a dispatch call reporting the hazard.

The man was 39 and big — 6 feet 6 inches, 270 pounds. An officer ordered him to step out of the traffic.

The man shouted. From four feet away, the officer caught a whiff of his breath and liquor.

The man kept shouting that the officer was going to die, as he wandered into the traffic. The officer turned on emergency lights and called for backup and medical aid.

The man was backing down the exit ramp into the freeway. Two officers followed him, one driving the wrong way in a patrol car. Another officer in a separate patrol car blocked the exit, preventing additional traffic from coming through.

Officers following the man on foot started closing in. The man dropped to his knees before anyone touched him. Soon, he was cuffed and stowed.

The man refused medical aid. In the patrol car, he shouted that the officer would die, that his career was finished. He spat on the windows of the car and refused to give his name.

Officers booked the man into the Pierce County Jail on suspicion of obstructing traffic. Jail staffers recognized him from previous contacts; the man was a convicted felon with restraining orders on file, but he had no active arrest warrants.

This story was originally published February 26, 2016 at 9:12 AM with the headline "Police beat: False names, a lost phone and shouting in traffic."