Sometime in June, on a warm night in San Dimas, California, two weary prospectors were winding down their day of treasure hunting. My brother and I were searching the front lawn for the treasures fallen from the pockets of students who recline there after school. This is a regular producer of coins and trivets using a metal detector.
My job is swinging the detector, while my brother Johhny literally "gets down" to the dirty work of digging up the treasure. In a few minutes, we found several coins under what in the daytime would be a good shade tree, but at 9:00 p.m. only cast a moon shadow on the cool, wet grass.
With a pocket full of quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies and other unidentified bits of metal, we decided that it was getting late when up pulls an L.A. Sheriff's Department cruiser. Being the gregarious type, I casually approached his vehicle and greeted the deputy "good evening", to which he responded "How's it going?"
"Pretty good for just the few minutes we've been out here, we've found about 37 cents in change and some other stuff," I responded while carefully reaching into my pocket to show him our cache. He was truly interested, so he got out of his cruiser and approached me to ask a few questions about where we were looking, what type of equipment we were using and had we "ever found anything really valuable?" A few feet away Johnny, who was reclining on the grass digging a target, told us that he had just found another nickel. A grand total of 42 cents in a little over half an hour. After a few minutes he said "Good luck!", shook my hand and got back into his cruiser and drove away.
After finding more coins and a few pop-tops, which are too plentiful a target, we heard a police helicopter flying low overhead, a rarity for the usually quiet and relatively low-crime neighborhood. It was shining one of those super high-intensity lights on the Bible College building across the street This exciting turn of events caused us to stop searching for the moment and gaze at the specticle above.
Within a few seconds, a Sheriff's cruiser was tooling around the corner, no lights or siren, but in an apparent hurry to check out the area surrounding the school cater-corner from my front lawn. We counted one, two, three more cruisers within the space of twenty seconds, all screeching to dramatic stops with searchlights blazing and radios blaring.
When the second police helicopter and the seventh Sheriff's cruiser arrived at the apparent crime scene, we decided to go inside and listen to the action on my police band scanner, as neither my brother nor I could spot anything even remotely unusual happening to warrant such activity. Just then, one of the Sheriff's cruisers took off up the street, his lights and siren wailing, after a car apparently fleeing the area of activity across the street. Johnny said, "Let's go listen to the scanner!", so, I turned off my detector and started walking up toward the front door. Johnny thought that the detector might look to the Sheriffs like a rifle the way I was carrying it, so I rested it over my shoulder in my customary "non-hunting" mode. He said "That's even worse!", in his careful but paranoid way. I joked casually about how maybe this situation involves our late night treasure hunting, and we both laughed.
Inside, with the scanner tuned to the local frequencies, we heard snippets of reports about "armed men", and "officer down", but not much of anything specific. Looking out my living room window, I noticed that a cruiser had stopped adjacent to the front lawn, and a Deputy was talking to a lady who was gesturing toward the very tree we had moments before been searching under. When I told Johnny to "Come and look at this!", he again said "What if this is really about us?", to which I could only shake my head in disbelief.
Being inquisitive, I walked outside to check out the story with the Sheriff's Deputies and the lady talking and gesturing to them so excitedly. As I approached them on the sidewalk, I overheard her saying "And the policeman was on the ground and one of the men had a gun in his hand, and I think it was HIM...", gesturing toward me. Had one of the Deputies who had just walked up onto the sidewalk (making a total of four) not been the same one who had shown all the interest earlier, I might have that moment been arrested or even fired upon with the woman who was so sure of herself calling the shots.
The Deputy who had spoken with me earlier called his fellow Deputies aside and explained that the "policeman" on the ground was none other than my brother, in his hiking shorts with a tee-shirt and sandals on, and that my "gun" was nothing more than a metal detector that we had been using to hunt coins on my front lawn.
One of the Deputies volunteered to give the woman a ride back home, where she had apparently told the Sheriff's Department that she had witnessed an apparent car theft and policeman laying shot on the ground as she was driving home just a few minutes earlier.
Seven Sheriff's cruisers, two police helicopters, a canine unit, one lady with a very active imagination and your tax dollars hard at work providing protection from dangerous treasure hunters that threaten your community! Only in America. God, I love it.
Please don't let this story dishearten you from your treasure hunting pastime, it is an isolated incident that hardly warrants attention...I hope.
---Jim Porter, 12-8-97
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