I once experienced a period of stress in college that had nothing to do with grades or deadlines for projects. During one Thanksgiving Break, I received a call from one of the campus police officers telling me they caught me stealing a cheeseburger from one of the dining halls, and that I was going to get a citation in the mail. Of course I hadn’t stolen anything, so I passed the occurrence off as nothing more than a prank… and then I got a citation in the mail. I was told to go to both a hearing with the Office of Judicial Affairs on campus and then go on trial for the magistrate. This whole thing got ridiculous very quickly, and so I called around trying to collect evidence for my case, but the Office refused to give me any until I met with them. When I finally did, I brought my stepdad along with me to help discuss the whole issue. The person in charge told me what she had heard from both the officer who called me and the manager of the dining hall. Apparently the manager had caught someone stealing a cheeseburger at some point and called it in. Asserting that I hadn’t done anything, this woman had the gall to accuse me of lying, and that I “won’t get away with something like that on this campus.” My stepdad and I left the office in disgust, and at that point we weren’t sure where we could go from there. But as a last ditch effort, we decided to stop by the police station. If the office didn’t seem to have any evidence aside from the claim and that they knew I was there at the time of the alleged theft, maybe the police would have something else to go on. When we arrived there, the deputy sergeant met us immediately, but refused to let us see any surveillance camera footage he said they had. His reasoning being that “the DA wouldn’t be very happy with us.” My stepdad, as frustrated as I was but much more vocal, told the deputy sergeant that if they were really interested in taking such a stupid case to court, he would hire his attorney to drive all the way to campus. They would have to pay for his time there since it was they who wanted this case to go through. The deputy sergeant had a rather disgusted look on his face after that, and left to go watch the footage with the chief of police. After waiting for about fifteen minutes, he came back and asked us to go talk to the chief himself. Seeing as how the police station was really just a historical home that had gone under renovations to appear like a police station, we walked up some cramped flights of stairs to the master bedroom, transformed into the chief’s office. The first thing he did when we sat down was apologize, and began to spin this wild tale about how they watched the footage and saw at once that the culprit was not me. The manger had indeed seen someone steal a cheeseburger and he did indeed walk away with it, but the manager saw me near this thief in line and decided to call the police and tell them, for whatever reason, that it was I who had done it. The officer who showed up never checked to see that the culprit was me, but merely took the manager’s word about the ordeal. In the end, my record was completely cleared and I had a rather enjoyable time chewing out the Office of Judicial Affairs lady to make sure she would never question my word again.
