Doofus Of The Day #154 and #155

Our two Doofi today both made similar mistakes.

Doofus #154 is from Jena, Louisiana.

Drug busts aren’t always easy.

But a Jena woman made things simple for the LaSalle Parish Sheriff’s Office when she tried to make a drug deal via text message, authorities reported.

The person on the other end of the phone was Sheriff Scott Franklin.

Tracie L. Ingram, 36, of Jena was arrested Monday and charged with criminal conspiracy to commit possession of cocaine with the intent to distribute and possession of drug paraphernalia, officials said.

In October, the Sheriff’s Office added an additional cell phone line to its plan and got a new phone number, Franklin said, and that number — authorities have since discovered — used to belong to an area drug dealer.

The detective assigned to the new number, Kevin Salters, started receiving odd text messages right after getting the phone. The text messages appeared to be from someone trying to purchase drugs. At first, Salters thought the messages were from co-workers playing a joke on him.

But he soon realized the messages were legit and turned the phone over to Franklin.

Within hours of getting the phone, Franklin and his team had Ingram in custody after just a few messages between her and Franklin, authorities said.

The woman wanted to buy $500 in cocaine, and through texts a buy was set up, police said. The Sheriff’s Office, with assistance from Louisiana State Police, had patrol cars hidden when Ingram pulled up to make the buy, officials said.

“I wish all of our arrests would fall into our laps like this one,” Franklin joked. “They say that our business is one of the only ones you don’t have to advertise for, it just comes to us. But in this case, well, that’s stretching that concept a little far. It’s never this easy.”

When officers searched Ingram’s vehicle, they found $500 in cash, baggies deputies suspect Ingram would have used to break up the cocaine into smaller packages to sell for profit and drug paraphernalia, authorities said.

“There was some hairy moments where I was trying to guess the lingo normally used by the dealer in the text, like what word they would use for the type of drugs or what they would say for the money,” Franklin said. “One wrong word or spelling could have triggered her to have been spooked and ended it all.”

Moral of the story: make sure your list of important cellphone numbers is kept up-to-date!

A tip o’ the hat to my online buddy, the Mad Rocket Scientist, for e-mailing me the link to the story of Doofus #155, from Everett in Washington State.

A 24-year-old man was arrested Wednesday morning for allegedly attempting to sell Oxycodone and other drugs.

Sounds mundane, until you hear that he was caught trying to make the deal inside a men’s room stall at the Everett Police Department.

Two plain clothes officers were in the bathroom when they heard a man answer his cell phone and attempt to make a deal for the drugs, said Sgt. Robert Goetz with Everett Police Department.

Goetz says the man appeared desperate to get rid of the drugs and made several other calls from inside the stalls as one of the officers listened in.

As the officer was telling his partner what he had heard, the man exited the stall and headed out of the bathroom. He noticed the officer, who was wearing a shoulder holster and gun, and asked if he worked for probation, Goetz said. Officers believe the man thought he was at the probation office.

When confronted by the officers, Goetz says the man admitted to trying to make the drug deals in the bathroom and handed over his stash of drugs to the officers.

The man was arrested and booked into the Snohomish County Jail for possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.

Moral of that story: first, make sure you know where you are (!); and second, don’t carry drugs around with you to either the police station or the probation office!

Ah, Doofi . . . they make life so much more entertaining!

Peter