Tallahassee's strangest stories of 2015 – Tallahassee Democrat
Tallahassee kicks in its own flair every year to the Sunshine State’s unbridled barrage of weird news.
#Floridaman doesn’t exist for nothing.
Whether it be incriminating mail, trying to pay for beer with a rock or the downright zany — drunkenly arriving at a bank robbery by cab — 2015 held its own for the unique and bizarre.
Here’s a look at 10 of the strangest stories from our pages this year.
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” star Nicholas Brendon was arrested after he trashed his Hotel Duval room in late February while he was in town for the Atl*Con pop culture festival.
Brendon was supposed to be the headliner at the event, but instead spent most of that Saturday getting out of jail after being charged with damage to property and criminal mischief.
In an exclusive interview with the Tallahassee Democrat after he bonded out of jail, Brendon described the incident as a sleeping pill induced “blackout” spurred by ongoing depression and substance abuse.
Court records say he flipped over the bed and the furniture in the room, broke a porcelain figurine, pulled the phone out of the wall and clogged the toilet, flooding the room’s carpet.
It started with a suspicious package at the post office and a generic sounding California name. It ended with a clogged toilet, a two-hour standoff and the arrest of 22-year-old man on drug charges.
Kevin Bailey was arrested in late February on charges of conspiracy to possess eight pounds of marijuana with intent to sell, tampering with evidence, maintaining a drug house and possession of paraphernalia.
Working with the Tallahassee Police Department, a postal investigator delivered the package, which was later found to contain eight pounds of individually wrapped parcels of marijuana, to a home on Westridge Drive.
Bailey fled to his nearby home and during a two-hour standoff with police tried to flush marijuana down the toilet leaving an herbaceous trail of evidence down the drain.
A trial date has not been set.
The fare for 47-year-old Stanley Geddie’s ride to the Capital City Bank on Capital Circle northwest in late March was $25.50.
He didn’t have the cash, but told the driver to hold on. He would be right back.
Geddie, who was drunk, court records say, walked into the bank and demanded money, telling clerks he had a handgun and plastic explosives.
Police found the cab driver who was angry he had not been paid waiting outside and an intoxicated Geddie inside the bank manager’s office.
Geddie was Tased and arrested without incident. No gun or explosives were found on him.
He was charged with attempted robbery, petty theft and resisting an officer. His court date is set for Jan. 19.
This one didn’t happen this year, but we learned about it in May after another inmate broke free from the Gadsden County lock-up.
On Jan. 21, 2014, Andrew Westberg, 36, was arrested after he said he accidentally shot a neighbor’s window with a BB gun.
He was released May 16.
While Westburg, who told the Tallahassee Democrat he was a little intoxicated, was being secured in a holding cell at the jail, he used the brim of his baseball cap to jimmy the door open.
The four or five guards that were watching him were in another part of the jail.
He thought about going back inside the closed door, but left the Gadsden County Jail through an open garage.
Like a scene out of “Escape from Alcatraz,” Westberg climbed the fence, walked onto the roof of the jail and climbed down the other side to freedom.
He was free for at least 4 hours before he was caught and taken back to jail where he served six months on escape and other charges.
Leon County’s schools were atwitter in February over what students thought was the death of a few bats during a chilly February. But whether or not they actually passed was never determined as reports from school officials and wildlife experts in Tallahassee differed.
Students at Chiles High School noticed fallen bats on school grounds. They thought they had died, but wildlife officials said they may have just lost the energy to remain in their hides or to fly and eat insects.
Bats are a common thing in the tall buildings at many of the county’s schools. They nest in the dark recesses there and come out at dusk to scoop up hundreds of insects for dinner.
After the conflicting reports, Blackthumb Wildlife Services started to close up nesting sites of the close to 500 bats on Feb. 12.
Meth is bad enough, but mailing it to inmates in the Leon County Jail landed three people with charges of introducing contraband into a detention facility.
Griffin K. Billingsly and Rebecca Burnsed were arrested in January after jail staff received information that inmate Christopher Mann was selling sheets of paper doused in meth oil.
Burnsed, according to court documents, would send Mann the paper through the prison mail, which he would sell to other inmates for $10 each.
They began monitoring the pair’s phone calls and testing his mail for the presence of the drug in November 2014.
Court dates have not been set.
The bomb squad was rolled out to the 4th Quarter Bar and Grill in February after a Maine man said he had explosives.
His antics — switching back and forth between using and not using crutches and doing hand stands across busy North Monroe Street — may have proven that Pine Tree stater’s could teach Florida man a thing or two.
The arrest of 23-year-old Jared Simpson on charges of making a bomb threat, petty theft and disorderly conduct among others started when he refused to pay his $10 tab.
But only after he tried to pay with a rock.
Rocks not being legal tender, Simpson decided to throw a ripped up dollar bill at the barkeep before leaving and returning with a bad credit card.
He said he was in town to party in the Apalachicola National Forest.
Simpson, who some patrons said was speaking in tongues before the bar was evacuated, left again and came back wearing a grey suit and carrying a briefcase.
He set the briefcase in a booth and said “anyone who goes near this will die,” while holding a cellphone or beeper-like device, court records say.
The Big Bend Regional Bomb Squad determined the briefcase and a backpack in Simpson’s car were not a threat.
A court date has not been set.
Police used a Taser on a man in May who was wearing only his skivvies as he dashed into the main concourse of the Tallahassee International Airport saying he had a plane to catch.
The man left his car running in the drop-off loading zone as he ran toward the security checkpoint with Tallahassee police yelling at him to stop.
He told police he was God and “was deep within sleep, like beyond sleep,” court records say. They were unable to determine if he was under the influence at the time.
The president of the Big Bend police union accidentally fired his weapon inside Tallahassee Police Department’s headquarters in September.
An internal investigation found Lt. Steve Slade violated TPD’s general orders involving weapons.
Slade’s gun went off while he was cleaning it in the office. The bullet hit the ejected magazine he was holding, bounced off his desk, went through a fanny pack and passed through the wall into a captain’s office before becoming lodged in the opposite wall.
Slade filed a lawsuit in November against TPD Chief Michael DeLeo claiming he had not been notified of the discipline sought against him or the reasoning behind it.
The lawsuit was dropped Dec. 8.
A photo surfaced of a rhesus macaque monkey running loose on Alligator Point in early December causing wildlife officials wondering where it came from.
Monkeys have been reported in nearby Bald Point State Park and in Lanark, but no none has been able to get their paws on the wily ape.
No one in the area around the Franklin County beach spot is permitted to have one of the primates, which hail from Asia, and no one in Florida has reported one missing, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials say.
Contact Karl Etters at ketters@tallahassee.com or @KarlEtters on Twitter.
