15744 Golden West Street  *  Huntington Beach,  CA  *  92647-2748
714/895-8367   *   714/895-8269 fax   *   http://www.gwc.cccd.edu
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                                           Copy by Marc S. Posner
                                         714/892-7711, ext. 55057
                                                 mposner@cccd.edu
                                                  January 8, 1999
                                                    Release: 99-1

STUPID CRIMINAL TRICK ENDS AT GWC
WHEN SUSPECT RUNS INTO TEACHER/COP

You have to die to earn a Darwin Award, so a man arrested this
week at Golden West College doesn’t exactly qualify. But he
certainly gets an honorable mention. For those who don’t know,
the Darwin Awards — made popular through vast e-mail circulation
— are granted to those who remove their genes from the societal
pool by committing stupid acts.

The 21-year-old Garden Grove man was apprehended on Wednesday
afternoon after botching a purse-snatching attempt by escaping
from a supermarket parking lot into the training compound of a
police academy at a neighboring college.

He had a plethora of available escape opportunities after
grabbing a woman’s purse outside a Lucky supermarket in
Huntington Beach, a picturesque coastal town in Southern
California, which is found annually on the FBI’s list of
America’s safest cities.

The suspect opted for the worst possible path.

Instead of heading into neighboring residential areas or for
crowded adjacent retail centers, he bolted across the street
toward the 122-acre campus of Golden West College. In addition to
being recognized for its academic and career programs, Golden
West is also known for two things a fleeing suspect should avoid:
ample grass-lined park areas and one of the state’s top police
academies, the Criminal Justice Training Center.

Undaunted, unaware, or perhaps cracking under the pressure of two
good Samaritans who pursued the alleged purse snatcher, the
suspect headed directly for the police academy, passing under an
archway with the “Criminal Justice Training Center” logo and into
the training compound.

There, the alleged criminal met justice in the form of Randy
Tucker, a police sergeant from the neighboring city of Garden
Grove and an instructor for Golden West College’s police academy.
Tucker, in uniform as is the custom of Criminal Justice Training
Center instructors, chased the unarmed man up an embankment
surrounding the training center, made a fine tackle and applied
the cuffs.

“This is certainly one of the poorest get-away attempts I’ve seen
in my 32 years of police work,” said Dave Barr, a former police
chief who now heads Golden West College’s Criminal Justice
Training Center and the campus Public Safety department.

                             —GWC—




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 One of the Coast Community Colleges serving Costa Mesa, Fountain
   Valley, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Midway City, Newport
                Beach, Seal Beach and Westminster
Kenneth D. Yglesias, Ed.D, President * Board of Trustees: Paul G.
   Berger; George E. Brown; Walter G. Howald; Jerry Patterson;
Armando Ruiz; Student Trustee * William M. Vega, Ed.D, Chancellor
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