I am not a criminal. I have been to court twice in my life and it was always as a witness for the prosecution. While I am not exactly a super law-abiding citizen I guess I have the good graces of not doing anything stupid enough for the authorities to warrant searching for.
However, I do not live in Florida.
I don't know if they do this around the world but if you are found guilty of a relatively minor crime you will sometimes be offered the option of getting out of prison provided you constantly wear an ankle monitor that lets the police know where you are at all times. It is waterproof and cannot be removed without it letting the authorities know that you have taken it off.
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It's probably a pretty embarrassing thing to have on you unless your friends are wowed by criminality, but I would be willing to bet that most of the people that have these things prefer them over being in prison...even if they do live in Florida.
Well not every Floridian feels this way and one person, who had just crashed their car into an apartment building decided that now was a good time to cut off his ankle monitor, thereby immediately alerting police to the fact that he was trying to make a getaway. It was also reported by other residents of the same building that a man was there attempting to break into the apartments.
I'm not a fan of surveillance, but I think if I had one of these things forced upon me by the police state that I would likely just keep it on and either wear it with pride or wear long pants. I also wouldn't take the opportunity to seize the day and take it off immediately after I crashed my own car into an apartment building. Talk about dead to rights.
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not sure if this is from the same incident, but you get the idea
The suspect is named Corey Michael Payton and upon hearing police sirens he barricaded himself in the 2nd floor of the building and refused to come out saying that he would shoot anyone who came through the door. It is tough to understand what was going through the guy's head at the time because honestly, you destroyed your getaway vehicle when you crashed it, then you gave away both your location and identity when you cut off your ankle monitor inside the same building you are committing crimes in. It should come as little surprise that Corey was out of prison and had the ankle monitor in the first place because of a burglary conviction.
Because of the threat of shooting officers, SWAT was called in and the apartment was evacuated of all residents.
I don't think you have to be smart to understand that once SWAT gets involved, it is time to give up. People don't get away from SWAT outside of movies and there is a really fantastic chance that you are gonna end up dead with a violent encounter with them. The "SW" in SWAT stands for "special weapons" and well, those are extra-efficient at killing you.
Corey is no normal Floridian though and even though the building was surrounded with highly trained special forces types, he decided to jump from the second floor building, Bruce Willis style and I guess his plan was to parkour land and roll into a sprint that lead to freedom. Instead, he immediately injured himself and was heli-lifted to a hospital where officers were waiting to ensure he didn't attempt to flee from the hospital.
I'm not really certain what Corey could have done in order to have this situation be better than it was but other than getting shot and killed I don't see any way that he could have made it any worse for himself. Now instead of just having his insurance pay for a building he crashed into (and probably not even facing jail time for it) he is facing a litany of additional charges and will likely be denied parole in the future.
Well done Corey!
To add another dumb aspect to this story the original article which was made by a professional news organization, incorrectly uses apostrophes twice in their very short writeup.
