Mystery Man with fake IDs/Uniforms

[Papadaddy]

Mystery man arrested at traffic stop with fake military ID...found to have apartment full of fake IDs and uniforms, including BSA.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/07/authorities-find-dozens-fake-ids-uniforms-after-arresting-mystery-man/

[Jeffrey H]

A strange person indeed. A reminder that we all need to be watchful of our surroundings especially at large events where someone can blend-in and impersonate an adult leader. Its a good idea to be particularly watchful of leaders that do not seem to have anything to do and just hanging around (i.e., not on event staff, not with a Troop, not visiting family or friends, etc.).

 

These are good opportunities to be sociable with others you do not know. Ask them innocent get to know you questions: Can I help you find someone or direct you somewhere? Are you looking for your Troop? So, how long have you been doing this Scouting stuff? If they are phony, too many questions will make them uncomfortable, not look you in the eye when talking, and you could catch them with incorrect or inconsistent answers to your questions.

 

[Tokala]

Great....he resides within my Council.

 

Florida is full of nutjobs. Almost as many as Congress!

[Hal_Crawford]

Jeffrey raises a good point. I had a friend who lived in LA and worked for a rock n' roll lighting company. This is about 30 years ago. His daily commute took him through one of the studio back lots. One day he was passing a TV shoot and decided that he would like to stop and watch. He had his tool belt so he stopped, put on it on and wandered over. Because he looked like he belonged there no one challenged him. Because there are so many crafts on a shoot, no one ever asked him to do anything--everyone assumed he was with a different crew. When he had seen enough he wandered away. He went on to do this a number of times and no one ever questioned him.

 

His motive was benign curiosity but what if he had been a stalker or worse? I suspect that crews today wear ID laminates but those are probably easier to fake than the assortment of ID the guy in Florida was carrying.

[Callooh! Callay!1428010939]

"Florida is full of nutjobs."

 

These relatively recent stats don't support that statement: http://www.samhsa.gov/data/2k9State/Ch6.htm

http://www.samhsa.gov/data/2k11/WEB_SR_078/SR110StateSMIAMI2012.htm

 

If we're talking about any mental illness:

"Nationally, 44.7 million adults aged 18 or older experienced any mental illness in the past year, corresponding to a rate of 19.8 percent of the adult population; among States, the highest rate occurred in Rhode Island (24.0 percent), whereas the lowest rate occurred in Maryland (17.2 percent)"

- in Florida this rate was 18.5% which is slightly below the 19.8% of the adult population in the US as a whole.

 

If we're talking only about serious mental illness:

"Nationally among adults aged 18 or older, the rate of SMI was 4.6 percent, which equates to 10.4 million Americans. Among individual States, the percentage of adults aged 18 or older with SMI ranged from 3.5 percent in South Dakota to 7.0 percent in Rhode Island."

- in Florida this rate was 4.72% which is just sixteen one hundredths of a percentage point higher than the figure for the nation as a whole which was 4.6%. 20 states have higher rates.

 

Of course this isn't taking into account differences in population density, a measure in which Florida ranks relatively high. So while Florida does not have high rates of mental illness relative to other states, it does have high population density and thus may have more total persons suffering from mental illness than do some states with higher rates but lower population densities. Still, this doesn't support the notion that Florida is full of nutjobs, unless we also stipulate that so is the rest of the world and that, even though Florida may be full of nutjobs, it is far less nutjobful than are many other regions of the globe.

 

Maybe a perception of regional nutjobfulness is due to being in a locale in which nutjobs are anomalously concentrated at a level of granular locality that might show up in the data were it granular enough and displayed in a heat-map rather than in state-line defined sections.

 

[Hal_Crawford]

That would only track diagnosed mental illness. There could be a whole lot of un-diagnosed crazy in Florida. Rhode Island may have better funded mental health services, leading to better screening and diagnosis. Or maybe they are just so much more crowded in Rhode Island that the mentally ill get noticed faster.

 

We have a lot of crazy people in Virginia but we have confined the worst to elected office in Richmond or exiled them to DC.

[Tokala]

Thanks for the chuckle Callooh. Somedays I swear that Florida is just a magnet for weirdos. Maybe it's the heat and humdity?

[Papadaddy]

Over the years, we have had guys "drop in" to troop meetings saying they wanted to get involved. When asked how they heard of our meeting, they said they were "just driving by" and saw scouts milling around in the parking lot. One guy started regaling us with his "war hero" status as an operative in Vietnam. My ASM, who really WAS special forces in Vietnam started asking him questions he couldn't answer...he got real nervous and said he had to go. Never saw him again.

[Tokala]

The Tampa Bay Times has posted some pictures of his uniforms and badges. The uniforms all have the silver loops and appear to have a unit commissioner patch. The old part is that they all seem to have old Southest Region patches on the right sleeves. He also manage to acquire and Eagle Scout award. I'm not sure which Council strip he has on the uniforms, but it's not West Central Florida (my Council)

 

http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/article1244684.ece(This message has been edited by Tokala)

[Tampa Turtle]

Yup this is our local story. Likely higher visibility with all the recent shootings and the RNC just around the corner. Authorities getting twitchy.

 

Florida is the 4th. most populous state and within 400,000 folks of overtaking New York so of course we have a LOT of crazies here.

 

This particular gentleman already impersonated a Coast Guard officer at some local event so he is more than just a "collector". I believe today's paper mentioned he had some priors.

 

I have had discussions with guys who claimed they were Vietnam vets. They would talk about Da Nang, etc. There was one guy who talked about getting involved with scouts (he used to hang out at the VFW post where scouts do flag ceremonies sometimes. I asked him his age and then I did the mental arithmetic. I figured if he was in 'Nam he must have been a 12 year old marine during the Fall of Saigon! Hey I was alive then and would have been the same age. I mentioned this and never saw him there again. I saw him on the bus some weeks later with a Gulf War vet hat...

 

Wow that one photo showed he had 4 BSA shirts. Maybe we should ask him how he feels about the Uniform shirt changes?

[Tokala]

I knew a young man in the OA that claimed he was 21 for about 5 years past his 21st birthday. It's still a running joke around some of us old time Florida OA guys.

[eisely]

We who live in California (the land of fruits, nuts and flakes) reject all claims of all other states to having a disproportionately large share of nut jobs. We pay them to move here.

[shortridge]

The important thing to realize is that you don't always have to have a uniform to "fit in." It certainly helps, but it's also fairly easy to get access simply by walking with confidence, purpose and a smile. Acting like you know what you're doing and belong there can get you past quite a few doors.

 

Think about a typical summer camp. If you see a man with beard stubble walking around in shorts, sneakers and a sweat-stained t-shirt, pausing to say "Hey, quit the running!" to a group of boys, are you going to stop and question him about whether he belongs there? I can't get the NCS standards file to load right now, but I believe it's now mandatory to have a system to identify campers and visitors. My old summer camp uses colored wristbands. No band, staff and leaders stop you.

[DeanRx]

yeah, this is where the ADULT LEADERS really need to do their job. If we're in camp and someone (anyone - camp staff or otherwise) walks into our camp area and I don't know them, they are going to get a, "Hi, how you doing? Is there anything I can help you with?" from me pretty darn fast.

 

Its part of that whole mentally awake thing in the oath.

 

I had a guy show up at a unit meeting in uniform with a unit commisioner patch on. He introduced himself and I told him I had not received word from him or from district or council that he would be attending our meeting that night so would he mind coming back another time and let me or the CC know about the attendance ahead of time.

 

Found out from council that the guy was on his way out of BSA (non YPG related issue) and had been a UC, but had no reason to be showing up to our unit's meeting other than he was wanting to still be "in the program". Probably not a harmful guy, but some folks don't know when or how to let go...

 

Would hate to see the potential outcome of this guy in FL if he had chose to do the same and show up posing as a UC unannounced at a unit that is less than dilligent in their vetting of visitors.

 

Bottom line - if they are NOT registed as part of your unit, they are suspect until proven otherwise.

[NJCubScouter]

Not to detract from the seriousness of the situation -- thankfully it appears that this guy was caught before he was able to use any of his id's or uniforms to harm anyone, but people do need to be vigilant -- but I want to talk about the photo of the Scouting uniforms. Someone above said there were four BSA shirts, one of the articles says there were six, but I count seven, though one of them seems a little odd to me.

 

At the top of the photo, there is a dark green Venturing uniform shirt which you can barely see. The patches on it almost seem to be floating in midair, but when I turned up the brightness on my monitor, I could see the color in the shirt. It has a commissioner or professional patch on the sleeve. (Is that right, on a Venturing shirt?) Then there are the four tan shirts in a row, with silver loops and various commissioner/assistant commissioner patches. (I notice none of them seem to have pockets on the sleeve, so I guess that would make them the "old" ODL-type shirts.) So that's five so far. Then there is a shirt that looks a little strange to me. It is not a color that is in use today, for any program. It is green, like the shirts I wore as a Scout in the late 60's and 70's, but it seems considerably darker than those shirts were. (Of course I could be remembering incorrectly, and I don't have my old shirt handy to check.) It is difficult to see it very well, but it doesn't really look much like an official BSA uniform shirt. It looks more like a collared golf shirt, but it has BSA patches on it (including troop numerals, the only one of these shirts that does.) Then there is another "regular" shirt, which is probably an ODL-type shirt but it could be a centennial shirt. So that's seven and that's it, though I don't know what the next shirt is (the white one; and I don't know what a Sea Scout shirt looks like), and then the bottom shirt is presumably a Coast Guard shirt.

 

Sorry the diversion into "Can you spot the BSA shirts in this picture."

 

By the way, I did not see a specific statement in the article that this guy was NOT a commissioner in the BSA, nor that he was not an Eagle Scout. The circumstances would seem to suggest that EVERYTHING he had was "fake", but we don't really know that for certain.