Page 12 - IAV Digital Magazine #563

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Police
in Devon is ask- ing for help in finding a bus pas- senger who caused £200 worth of damage by eating his seat
–
or at least a chunk of it.
The young man was traveling on the bus in Paignton, on the
English
riviera, when he was apparently seized by an attack of hunger or boredom and began biting the
leather seat.
It is not entirely clear whether he swallowed the hunk of the seat or spat it out but CCTV footage caught the sus- pect gripping a bottle of fizzy drink, which he might have used to wash it down.
Devon and Cornwall police have chewed over the evidence since the incident on 25 May but have drawn a blank, so have released a CCTV still of their chief suspect to help track him down.
A police spokesman summed the crime up: "While traveling between Paignton and Torquay on a number 12 bus, a male passenger
started chewing the leather seat he was sitting on and continued to pick at the hole with his hand to make further damage. Around £200 of damage was caused."
The suspect is described as male, in his late teens to early 20s, 5ft 9ins, and (perhaps not sur- prisingly) of stocky build. He has short dark hair and was wearing a dark- colored T-shirt and light jeans.
The bus operator Stagecoach's con ditions of
carriage ask pas- sengers to "refrain from eat- ing and drinking items which make the environment unpleasant for other customers or otherwise cause offense”. It
does not address the question of eating bits of the bus.
A spokeswoman for the company said the passen- ger had only been on the bus for 20 minutes. She said he had been chat- ting to people on the bus but then decided to munch on the seat. She did not know if he had swallowed the leather and emphasized that he had only eaten a small part of the seat – but enough to make it unprac- tical to repair it. "It's not the case that he ate the whole seat," she added.
Anybody who can help identify the passenger can call Crime stop- pers on 0800 555111, in confi- dence.
Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
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