You don’t mess with people in small towns. If you do once, you don’t twice.
Just asked Sean Lee. He’s the guy police say stole a 69-year old’s wallet in La Crosse, Washington; then got smacked around, hogtied and left in the middle of Main Street for the police to find.
The ”victim” 69-year old Larry Garrett says Lee knocked on his door Friday night. Lee told him that he needed gas and food. His car was out of the former, and he hadn’t had any of the latter in several days. So, being a charitable person, Garrett paid for the man to fill his tank and then stepped in the kitchen to prepare some food for Lee–some frozen Taquitos, to be precise.
While Garrett was in the kitchen, police say Lee grabbed his wallet that was sitting on a couch. Garrett returned from the kitche, noticed his wallet was missing and confronted the man. Once he found the wallet in the man’s pocket, he smacked Lee (44 years younger than he) upside the head. At that point Lee took off, wallet in hand, out the door and into his parked car.
The problem for Sean Lee: he ran right into Larry Garrett’s cousin, Lowell Garrett. Lowell grabbed the crook as he was getting in his car, threw him on the pavement, and then–as neighbors and friends sat on Lee to subdue him–tied him up.
But this little band of justice-seeking La Crosseites wasn’t done yet. Nope. Instead of moving Lee to the side of the road, they left him in the middle of the road. The middle of La Crosse’s Main Street. He wasn’t in imminent danger, few cars drive the road, and those that did, stopped to see what was going on. When I asked Lowell why they didn’t merely move the man to the sidewalk after they tied him up he replied “Well, we didn’t want to move him because we didn’t want to chance it that he’d get away.” Fair enough. So for 20 minutes they took turns sitting on Lee as he lay tied up in the middle of the street.
When the police arrived they couldn’t believe what they saw. The Whitman County Sheriff told me, of course, he doesn’t encourage vigilante justice, but admitted this time it worked, this time it made getting the suspect rather simple, and this time–as the deputies rolled up and saw a hogtied man in the middle of Main Street–it was sort of funny.
Bottom line: Don’t mess with La Crosse. Seriously. Don’t.
The beautiful town of La Crosse
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