Room service: Orange police booked up on wide range of calls at local hotels
ORANGE, Ohio -- Often dispatched to local hotels for various incidents along Orange Place Drive, police recently checked in on everything from a man trashing his room and threatening to jump off the fifth floor to a minivan crash landing on top of an Audi.
Along the way, officers briefly pursued a fleeing stolen Jeep and arrested a couple of grifters getting a room on someone else’s bonus points.
Responding to a report of a man in distress at the Hampton Inn at the Hampton Inn on the evening of June 29, staff told officers he was upstairs “going crazy, throwing stuff and destroying the room.”
On the way up, police heard him shouting and throwing objects against the wall. Once the Garfield Heights man, 57, removed the furniture barricading the door, police found the room disheveled, with a hunting knife on the table next to a liquor bottle.
The window was busted out, with glass shards strewn about on the floor and in the parking lot five stories down. The thermostat and smoke detector had both been removed and destroyed.
Appearing manic, paranoid and in crisis, police handcuffed him for his own safety as he said he felt he was being watched and broke the window because he wanted to jump. He was taken to Ahuja Medical Center for a psychiatric evaluation.
Bon voyage
The next morning (June 30) police were called to the Pinecrest AC Marriott after the front desk clerk reported she got a call from an irate man in North Carolina threatening to shoot up the hotel -- including her, she said -- due to someone renting a room using his accumulated rewards or “Bonvoy” points.
Police went to the room in question and smelled both smoked and raw marijuana. A Cleveland man, 32, who answered the door -- falsely claiming that someone inside the room was the North Carolina man’s brother -- had multiple warrants, including a felony probation violation that landed him a cell at the Cuyahoga County Jail.
A Maple Heights woman, 31, had several misdemeanor warrants in her home town and was turned over to police there. Staff placed both on a “restricted list” preventing them from renting rooms.
The North Carolina man later apologized to police, saying he never intended to shoot the clerk and was just upset that someone obtained his personal information.
Flock hit
Then on July 1 just after midnight, a patrol officer stopped at the light on Chagrin Boulevard noticed a black Jeep Cherokee turn south onto Orange Place just as a Flock Safety[1] camera alert went out that it was stolen.
The officer soon located the Jeep at the Extended Stay North, where a woman passenger was getting out and turned on the cruiser’s emergency lights, with the suspect stopping twice, at one point asking “what did I do.”
One thing he didn’t do was place both hands in the air, as instructed by the officer, who had unholstered his firearm. Instead, the driver, looking to be “in his 40s,” shut his car door, took off and was last seen merging onto I-271 North where he turned all of the vehicle lights off.
Police went back to check on the woman who had gotten out of the stolen Jeep and the night clerk could not remember what room she was in when she renewed her key card.
Off the wall
Officers returned to the Extended Stay North around 5:45 p.m. July 1 on a report of a car running into a tree and a fence. They found a Ukrainian man, 40, who recently immigrated to the U.S. with his wife and two kids, ages 7 and 3.
They were all in the 2011 Dodge Journey when he hit the gas pedal instead of the brake, sending the van not only through the metal fence but over the retaining wall into the lower adjacent lot of LJI Collision.
No injuries were reported as the minivan came to rest on top of a 2020 Audi in the LJI lot. The van was removed from the roof of the Audi by a towing company. The man provided his Ukrainian driver’s license and a State Farm Insurance policy.
Police told him he would be responsible for the fence, the tree and the Audi.
Good Samaritan
Back on the morning of June 27, police were called to the Drury Inn & Suites, where they met with an East Hanover, NJ, woman, who had parked her Toyota Sienna in the lot closest to the building the previous night at 11 p.m. When she returned the next morning, she found damage to her left rear side and bumper.
As a result, she could not get the wheelchair ramp down at first, although a Drury’s maintenance worker was able to help her access the ramp and the van.
Hotel management planned to review the overnight security video.
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References
- ^ Flock Safety (www.cleveland.com)
- ^ cleveland.com/newsletters (www.cleveland.com)
- ^ Chagrin Solon Sun (www.cleveland.com)