Slight Detour – August/September 2025
It has been said that if you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done. This typically means that in order to reach a higher goal, you need to step out of your comfort zone. Overall, it is sound advice. Usually.
We start this Slight Detour with an individual who may have taken this advice a bit too literally.
Deputies from the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office recently arrested a man after he attempted to steal a 2025 Ford Mustang 5.0 GT during a test drive in Silsbee, Texas.
According to police, Justin Colley visited the Silsbee Ford dealership and requested a test drive of the muscle car. After leaving the lot with a salesperson, Colley allegedly pulled a gun, forced the employee out of the vehicle and proceeded to make his getaway.
Roughly 90 minutes later, a deputy spotted the stolen vehicle, effectively ending Colley’s brief tenure as a Mustang “owner.” For his short-lived joyride, Colley was charged with aggravated robbery, unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.
Now for the part where we realize criminals aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed: Investigators said they were able to quickly identify Colley because he had left his driver’s license at the dealership while filling out the paperwork for the test drive. The devil is in the details, and that’s a pretty big one to overlook.
Despite his outside-the-box thinking, I’m pretty sure he didn’t have “get arrested” on his vision board when he dreamed of owning a bit of American muscle. Let this be a lesson that there are no shortcuts in life.
High stakes at low speed
For our next story, we go from good old-fashioned speed to a vehicle that moves at a decidedly slower pace. Police in South Carolina were recently led on a low-speed chase by a man driving an Komatsu excavator.
The chase started around 3 a.m. while officers with the North Charleston Police Department were responding to another call. While en route, the officers noticed an excavator crossing over Highway 78, heading toward a grocery store.
When police arrived, they noted the front of the store was “freshly damaged and destroyed,” presumably from the excavator. When they attempted to pull the driver over, he proceeded to take off down the highway in the excavator at a blazing 3 mph.
Now, I realize that it is likely not easy to stop a massive piece of construction equipment, even at such a slow speed, but this chase lasted for over an hour! The slow-moving joyride came to a halt when the driver got stuck in the mud at a local fairground.
It was at that point the driver took off on foot. Given that the average jogging speed of an adult is about 5 mph, it’s possible the footrace was a high-speed pursuit compared to the chase that preceded it. That said, it wasn’t faster than a dog can run, and the K-9 unit made quick work of catching the suspect.
I’m not entirely sure what this guy was thinking as he was creeping along with cops on his tail, but it does make me realize I have no desire to watch excavator races anytime soon.
Not the dog!
For the life of me, I don’t understand people who hurt dogs – or any other animal, for that matter. It takes a special kind of jerk to take out your anger on man’s best friend. And one of those jerks recently made his way through the Washington Dulles International Airport.
According to a report from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an Egyptian man recently pled guilty to federal charges after kicking an agriculture detector dog who was just doing his job.
The 5-year-old beagle named Freddie was inspecting baggage from a plane arriving from Cairo when he alerted his handler to one suitcase. When the handler started questioning the owner of the suitcase, 70-year-old Hamed Ramadan Bayoumy Aly Marie, the man “violently kicked Freddie with sufficient force to lift the 25-pound beagle off the ground.”
According to the agency, Customs and Border Patrol agents “immediately descended upon Marie” – hopefully with sufficient force to lift him off the ground.
A search of the man’s suitcase uncovered 55 pounds of beef, 44 pounds of rice, 15 pounds of eggplant, cucumbers and bell peppers, 2 pounds of corn seeds and a pound of herbs.
“Being caught deliberately smuggling well over 100 pounds of undeclared and prohibited agriculture products does not give one permission to violently assault a defenseless Customs and Border Protection beagle,” Christine Waugh, CBP’s Area Port Director for the Area Port of Washington, D.C., said in a statement. “Any malicious attack on one of us is an attack on all of us, and CBP will continue to work with our investigating and prosecuting partners to deal swift and severe justice to perpetrators.”
Amen to that. You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.
Fortunately, Freddie was OK, but he did sustain contusions to his ribs. As for Marie, he pleaded guilty to harming an animal used in law enforcement and was ordered to pay the veterinarian’s fees. On top of that, he was ordered to report to CBP for immediate removal from the country.
I bet that made for an interesting conversation when Marie was asked by friends why he was home so soon from the U.S. – that is, assuming someone who would kick a dog actually has friends.
Take it easy
We end this Slight Detour with a stop in Winslow, Ariz. The small town of roughly 9,000 people is best known for being mentioned by the Eagles. In fact, aside from being located along Route 66, that’s pretty much all it’s known for. Until now.
Recently, Love’s opened a new travel stop in the sleepy Arizona town. The new location has 81 truck parking spaces, laundry, showers and all the other amenities you’d expect from Love’s.
While I’m sure it is just a run-of-the-mill truck stop, it did make me smile thinking of truckers sending us photos of themselves “standing on the corner” while stopping for fuel or snacks.
So if you’re in the neighborhood, pick a corner and snap a selfie – then submit them to Mark_Schremmer@landlinemag.com. Mark covers a lot for us and has plenty on his plate, so a flood of photos would probably help break up the monotony.
We will also accept photos of you “suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freez”. LL