A 26-year-old local man was arrested twice this week for allegedly stealing cases of Miller Lite from the 7-Eleven in Basalt.
On Wednesday night, a clerk said he spotted the man load a case of suds into his backpack and walk out of the store.
Basalt police found a man matching the clerk’s description at a nearby bus stop. He wasn’t wearing a backpack and didn’t have identification on him. But on further inspection of the scene, police found a backpack stuffed into a nearby Aspen Daily News paper box. The backpack contained a case of Miller Lite and a driver’s license with a photograph of the suspected thief on it.
The man was arrested for petty theft and released.
But it was still Miller time Thursday night, when a different 7-Eleven clerk called police reporting that a man had just walked out of the store with two 12-packs. A Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy found the same alleged beer thief, again waiting for the bus. He was charged again with theft and released.
Police hope to ban him from 7-Eleven.
“We don’t know if he just started doing it or if he just started getting caught,” said Basalt Police Sgt. Stu Curry. “But that’s one of the dumbest crimes I’ve seen.”
In other local crime news:
— A 25-year-old man from Brighton working construction in Snowmass was cited for obstructing police Thursday after repeatedly attempting to fight his girlfriend at Snowmass Town Hall, police say.
Police originally responded to the couple’s fighting — loudly and aggressively, police say, but not violently — at a Snowmass Village residence. They made no arrests and took the woman to the police station, for her to get a ride to her home on the Front Range.
But once they had arranged for a family member to pick her up, her boyfriend allegedly came into the station at Town Hall, yelling. Police told him to stay away, but they say he returned several times, trying to get at the woman.
Police gave the man a court summons and he did not come back.
— An Aspen community safety officer drove into a motorcyclist on Main Street on Monday. The fender bender resulted from the officer’s failure to see the biker while she made a left-hand turn off of Monarch onto Main.
The motorcyclist was not wearing a helmet, and sustained a minor head injury that required stitches. The officer got a ticket for failure to yield.
— Two alleged underage drinkers were collared in Aspen:
Last Thursday after 1 a.m., Aspen police say, their officers recognized a local teenager drinking a beer at Eric’s Bar. He told them he was going home after the beer, according to a report, but they took him to jail instead.
Early Monday morning at Belly Up, after the Tishamingo rock show, bouncers called the cops on a 20-year-old booze-drinker, who was jailed.
— Compiled by Andrew Travers
