Just a Typical Day for Roy

A (quite clearly intrepid) reporter at KUTV in Salt Lake City files this report:

"A naked woman driving through the streets of Roy wandered into a stranger's home and took a shower Thursday, according to police."

It seems that "Roy" is a town somewhere in Utah. But the sentence is much funnier if you don't know that. Roy is actually just down the road from Odgen. We have been to Odgen. No, really, it's true.

But that's quite a sentence, yes? Although it does sort of leave you on your own with the whole "Did she leave the car at the curb, or what?" thing, doesn't it? And whence came the information regarding this person's gait between automobile and showerbath?

"Police say the string of strange behavior began at a relative of the suspect’s home just before 4 p.m. when Natalie Peterson reportedly got into an argument with people in the home. She then allegedly ripped her clothes off and jumped in her car, according to police."

We don't know about you, but we've been around angry women on occasion. In fact, we've been known to get into arguments with women from time to time ourselves. And, while a fair number of them have, as a consequence, jumped into (or, on one memorable occasion, out of) their cars, this may be the first documented instance of an angry woman, in the middle of an argument, ripping her clothes off. Our own experience is that there is an inverse relationship between those two actions: More argument, less clothes ripping off. But maybe that's just us.

But the singularity of this incident may lie in the fact that it took place in a location where buildings (in this instance, "the suspect's home") reproduce sexually, and accordingly have relatives. But, again, we may just be misreading a perfectly good sentence.

"A short time later, a homeowner in the area called police saying a strange woman was in his home taking a shower."

Now here, of course, one must be careful. Many's the time we have found a strange woman in our home taking a shower. But in this instance, it seems clear that the fellow meant to report that there was, in his shower, a woman previously unknown to him.

Aside from that, grammatically speaking, this sentence makes us tired.

We leave to the active imaginations of our readers embellishment of two matters raised by inference in this sentence: First, the thought process upon discovering his uninvited guest, as our witness sought to determine exactly what it was appropriate, possible, or desirable to do; and, Second, the conversation that then transpired between said homeowner and the police dispatcher. Run those through your mind a few times. You see what we mean?

"Police found Peterson in the shower but as they tried to arrest her she became combative, spitting, kicking, hitting and scratching officers. She even threw urine at them.

Police believe Peterson was under the influence of methamphetamines."

That last would seem to explain quite a lot. Of course, we can imagine that any attempt by armed police to remove us from our shower might provoke an energetic reaction, drugs or no.

But our reporter, while showing an alarming fondness for lists, again leaves out vital matters of fact. Not to put too fine a point on it but, well . . . . Think about it this way: We've personally been honored to have had coffee, Coke, champagne, water, beer, wine and a liquid antibiotic suspension thrown at us. But in every single instance we recall a container of some sort was involved. Apparently not so in Roy. It is always possible that no throwing, per se, was involved.

"She has been booked into the Weber County Jail on counts of lewdness, criminal trespassing, criminal mischief, assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, driving on suspended license and no insurance and propelling bodily fluids at officers."

We can but admire a state so well-ordered as to have, on its statute books, the crime of "propelling bodily fluids at officers." It may be, of course, that the prosecutor need not prove all of the five elements of the crime here set out, but without further research that is pure speculation. (You're forgetting "at".) And kudos too must go to the local police who, in the midst of what must have been a busy day, had the presence of mind to detect the absence of insurance documentation. Good work all around.

The television station's web site has video but, alas, none of the sort we might wish.

Also on the web site, at least when we visited, was a service we've seen before permitting readers to have news stories of particular interest sent to them via email. Typically, these are keyed to the story being displayed. In this instance the web site offered as subjects one might select for tracking both "lewdness" and "naked women."

It's an honor to live in a country where we don't have to make this stuff up.