What is the worst crime/s you'ver ever been involved with personally?

I’m a Vietnam Vet.

So what did you witness @Ron_C that you’d feel comfortable sharing? BTW, thank you for your service and the sacrifice you made to protect me and my country.

Vandalism of personal property and Arson. In one instance, friends and I spray painted a person’s car from it’s original Turquoise color with Orange and Black paint, including the windows and then punctured all tires to leave the car on the driveway. The other instance involved my same group of friends and I to set the lawn and roof of one of the girls’ ex bf’s house on fire by throwing several Molotov cocktails. I’m not sure which one is considered worse by law or in terms of punishment meted out or the dollar amount of damage.

I sat in on a few days of a long mob trial. The defendant was convicted of seven murders (he was indicted for 18). When victims’ family members were allowed to address the court, they took the opportunity to tell the guy what they really thought of him. These weren’t mob families, just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I simultaneously felt good for them having the chance to face the guy and bad that they were involved at all.

I’ve been fortunate not to be touched by serious crime personally.

Did anyone get hurt @Neizvestnaya? I hope not. Could you imagine if the house had caught on fire and they were trapped inside? Oh, not good.

Wow, @jaytkay. That must have been intense. 18 indictments for murder is a big deal. I can’t imagine what the families must have said to that man (I’m assuming it was a man.)

@bkcunningham: No, no one was injured. We did think about who was inside because when the last went up in a blaze (it was a redneck type lawn of dried up grass/weeds) we saw people inside yelling and going out a back door that led to a shared back alley. We were very very bad girls.

@bkcunningham please don’t thank me for my service. I find this new trend very disturbing.
The whole war is disturbing to me. I was19 when I got there and thought it was going to be a great adventure but all I saw was a country bombed and people degraded. They were never a threat to our country and even tried to get protection from France colonialism from us. We refused and the Chinese helped them.

What did I see? A U.S. president that didn’t mind killing civilians or his own military, a corrupt puppet government, people run over by army trucks and left in the streets to die, abandoning fellow Americans to be killed and captured, CIA selling drugs, young girls forced into prostitution, and young military men ruined for life. That is as specific as I want to get.

It isn’t something new to me @Ron_C. My father is a veteran of WWII, my oldest sister’s husband served during the same time you served, another sister’s husband is a POW/MIA in that same time period in Vietnam, and my stepdaughter’s husband is serving now. I’m sure they all witnessed things like you did. I didn’t mean to offend you by offering you my thanks. I don’t want to deviate from my original question too much. I’ve heard many of their stories and other stories from war from people who witnessed it first hand too. It is a terrible thing that I can only imagine from their words and sometimes pictures. One of my brother-in-laws who was in Vietnam has pictures of smoking pot with the locals so to speak. It is like looking at photos in a Life magazine. Ya’ know what I mean It didn’t want to make it political and forgive me if you took it like that. Just interested in your stories is all man?

@bkcunningham didn’t mean to jump on you but I can’t think of a war since WW2 that was justified and Vietnam plus what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan have me really upset because they are ruining the lives of so many young kids and the instigators are running around free on a government pension.

We were talking yesterday about the storms and tornadoes and other weather events that have killed people and devastated lives. I asked my husband what he made of all of it and he said it is because we are so fast at communicating events to each other nowadays.

He said when we watched the Gulf War on television and saw it realtime like we were watching Publishers Sweepstakes award a surprise award. “We are approaching the house now. We are about to give them the biggest surprise of their lives. Are you ready cameraman and sound guy? Get ready. I’m knocking on the door.”

So if you consider that a crime, I’m sure you have some stories that would rock our world. We twitter wars now. Somehow I think it may be making us soft to the realities of life.

@bkcunningham I was discussing the fact that the Predator drones that are killing anti-American forces are also killing their families. The pilots that fly the drones are based in Nevada and go home after a work day that leaves a lot of collateral damage. In effect, they are Twittering the war to people all over the world, up close and personal.

What is going to happen to the pilots when they realize that they are killing people, not playing a video game?

They have to hear stories from real people about real things sometimes @Ron_C to see reality.

@bkcunningham I am afraid that a great deal of money is going to be spent rehabilitating these young people and that the conservative war mongers will do everything to limit that amount. I don’t think that they understand that other people have a conscience.

Transporting…basiclly.

Black market involvement.

Ummm, my dogs and I find dead people . . . homocides, suicides, arsons . . . lots of different crimes

Well as I work in a hospital I get to see the end results of quite a lot of pretty nasty shit…but the worst was a teenage girl who was forced to drink acid by her parents because they didn’t like her boyfriend. The result was she lost her voice and most of her mouth and her oesphagus.

Murder

My life is pretty tame: I was just a kid, maybe 12, and I was house-sitting for a neighbor while they were on vacation. I kept noticing things moved around in the house that I didn’t think I had touched. Finally I saw some teenagers sneaking around the house one day and put two and two together, turns out they were breaking into the house repeatedly, day after day, eating food out of the fridge, and sitting in their hot tub. I called the cops on them. This was the only thing I could think of.

Land Mafia. My family was friends with them.

Got mixed up in $10,000 of counterfeit $100.00 bills that I found. Took a very expensive attorney to convince the Feds I was just an idiot who did not know what he was dealing with!

Transporting what @woodcutter?

Black market involvement? Like Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Prada @Vunessuh? Oohh, tell me more girlfriend. I love purses.

What kind of dog @Kayak8? A shepherd or a blood hound?

@Lightlyseared, oh yeah, being around a hospital. I hadn’t thought of that. You must hear all kinds of stories and see some pretty horrible crap.

@Mariah, that would stick with you if it happened when you were only 12. What did the police do?

@CaptainHarley murder? I know you are a veteran and I’m reluctant to ask you to tell me more seeing how my other question to a vet went. LOL But do tell, sir.

@Cruiser, that sounds like a novel. How in the world did you end up finding $10,000 of conunterfeir $100 bills. That would be just my flippin’ luck. Find some loot and it is counterfeit.

@bkcunningham That was how I felt….I found it in the drop ceiling of a vacant office warehouse space that I was rehabbing. Lucky me! :(

When I was 13, I kicked out the slats on the gazebo at the park.

@YARNLADY vandalism! Uh oh. Don’t spoil the image I have or you! Just kidding. Why did you kick out the slates?

I witness and tried to stop some bouncers attacking a man. My husband and I heard a commotion and turned around to see this guy being thrown out of a pub. The bouncers than threw him to the ground and his head hit the floor. We heard it hit the concrete from the other side of the street. We crossed the street and by this time they had his leg pushed up behind him and his arms pinned behind him and he was pressed into the ground and begging them to get off him. They wouldn’t. People were sitting around eating their dinners and watching all this unfold but saying nothing. We and by now a couple of other people, repeatedly told the bouncers to let him up and that they were going beyond reasonable force when they wouldn’t called the police and waited until they arrived. We gave our names to the young man’s friends in case it went any further and statements to the police.

I am so ashamed to admit that when I was about 10, on a dare, I stole from the local supermarket. I had agreed to steal something so I stole an OXO cube from the broken goods box on the checkout counter at the local supermarket. I was so ashamed I ate the evidence. Note to others contemplating such a life of crime, OXO cubes taste very bad. Don’t do it.

What are OXO cubes @Bellatrix? I can’t imagine witnessing that with the man and the bouncers. I know of a young black man in West Virginia whom the police attacked outside a new bar that had just opened in an area which was very segregated. Anyway, he was left a quadropelegic and later died from his injuries.

His uncle was the writer of song “Some Kind of Wonderful” and other great songs. There is a city parked named for him. Sad. Sad indeed. His mother is one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet.

Stock cubes. You know, you put them in water and they dissolve and you use them to cook with .. trust me.. they taste like shit :-D… (well not literally… ).

As I said to the police officers who attended, at the very least had they been involved in this incident they would have ended up on YouTube or the news and probably on a charge. They agreed. I think the bouncers got away with it though.

Oh, I call them boullion cubes. I used them in water in a cup and drink the broth. Cheap and good. Just like me. LOL

Yeah, the bouncers should have been questioned at the very least and made to give full account for the man’s injuries.

Yes boullion cubes… that’s them.

I was standing in the middle of two factions during a gang shoot out.
Yup, bullits firing on both sides of me. I just turned to my friends and laughed about how stupid I was.

I stole a candy bar from a drugstore when I was 12.

@bkcunningham I kicked them out because I like the sound the wood made when it broke, a very interesting crack.

@bkcunningham Any smart, biddable breed of dog with a long nose can be trained for SAR work. I have a labradoodle and a German Shepherd. My first search dog was a lab. Bloodhounds are used pretty much exclusively for tracking/trailing and work on-lead ( a bloodhound on scent would walk off a cliff they are so intent on following the trail). I train for the air scenting discipline and my dogs work off lead. This enables them to get on top of rubble piles and get their nose into other spots where a lead could add to the danger.

I am ashamed to admit it, as the person who was involved with the crime(s) was a vastly different version of myself and under extreme emotional duress at the hands of a sociopath.

I won’t go into details, not to be dramatic, but because I’m not certain of the statute of limitations and because what we did was possibly/likely a felony. If not a felony, then certainly a serious enough crime in the eyes of our state of residence.

I’m not at all proud of it and I’d never do it again, for the record.

A library that I worked in for two and a half years was the scene of two violent crimes. The first happened one evening. I was standing looking towards a window and saw something fall past by the tower block/high rise building next door. I looked out the window and saw it was a body. I could see the person was definitely dead even from my second floor window. I was quite shocked and my head felt all buzzy and strange. We later found out that it was a woman who had been pushed off one of the top floor balconies by two men.

The second traumatic event was when I was in the office and the buzzer from the front desk went crazy – the system was one buzz – speak via intercom, two buzzes – it’s busy and we need extra help, three buzzes – emergency. Clearly there was something wrong. There were about five of us in the office and we ran out towards the desk, pushing our way through hoards of thronging students. At that point, I sort of realised that there probably wasn’t any danger as there was no panic. We arrived at the desk to find a scene of horror and gore. A student lay on the ground with a knife in his chest and blood pooling around his head. I was in a complete state of shock but did manage to remember some training and asked the member of staff on the desk if she had phoned for help. She had only buzzed. I called the emergency operator and spoke quite clearly and calmly and got across what the operator needed to know – police and an amublance and where I was. The operator was shocked too as she just said Right and we hung up. Couple of minutes later 5 first aiders appeared. They took charge. The police came next, in about 10 minutes, and the ambulance was last. The guy got taken away to hospital in the air ambulance and was ok. He had been sliced several times to the back of his head and then stabbed. The guy who did it was just hanging around and got arrested once the police came. It was a fight between ex-friends. The library carpet was never the same.

:-| Who would thunk libraries could be so dangerous! @Stinley both of those things must have been horrible to experience.

@Bellatrix I know! No other libraries I worked in have been quite as dangerous….usually it’s just angst about library cards being suspended due to unpaid fines. The university was very good and after a couple of months paid for us to go on an outing, which sounds a bit lame but was actually quite nice and healing as it helped us draw a line and say it’s all behind us now.

Well at least they acknowledged your stress, so I hear you on them doing something. Wow though. Where is this library? Where I work I think the most dastardly thing that has happened would be a tanty about the library fines or a lost book.

It was in London and up to that point the worst things going on were people hiding popular books and trying to steal books by ripping out barcodes, thinking these set the alarms off. Maybe we should start a new question “What is the worst library crime/s you’ver ever been involved with personally?”

lol indeed. We renovated our university library and in the ceiling above the toilets they found all these books with the spines removed or chapters ripped out. Book abuse is a terrible crime.