Remember the outbreak of squeegee men back in the late 80s and early 90s? You’d stop at a traffic light and some grifter would sidle up, perfunctorily wipe your windshield and then demand money in exchange for leaving your glass in one piece. While it happened in a number of cities, it was one of the best-loved parts of the gorgeous mosaic that was New York City under David Dinkins’ administration. Along with the race riots, that is. Anyway, a new twist on the scam is back now that a large swath of the country has spent most of the last two months under a thick blanket of global warming . . .
As lowellsun.com tells it,
“A man forcefully demanding money for shoveling the driveway of a woman who hadn’t asked that her driveway be shoveled found himself dealing with a very tough customer in Centralville (Massachusetts) Tuesday night.”
Probably figuring they’d be easy marks, the opportunistic shoveler picked the home of a 79-year-old woman and her 81-year-old husband. But when granny told him to get lost, he became more insistent.
“He started banging on the door louder so they got nervous,” Capt. Thomas Meehan said of the couple who live in the home.
It turns out fear wasn’t all the couple had, though. The woman also has a license to carry a firearm.
“She feared he was going to break in so she opened the door again with the firearm at her side,” Meehan said. “She never pointed it, but she said ‘get off my property. I’m going to call the police.’ “
“He decided to leave,” Meehan said of the man.
Imagine that. The cops later found him, but no arrest was made. And Capt. Meehan told a reporter that the woman broke no laws in displaying her handgun in the doorway of her own home. But we knew that.
[h/t LeftShooter]