Another day, another masterpiece of criminal mastermind behavior in the Hub City. This week’s standard-bearer for local innovation is 38-year-old Jerry Smith, who decided that actually paying for two cases of beer at a convenience store near Interstate 27 and 34th Street was purely optional. When a store employee had the absolute audacity to follow him outside to ask for crazy things like “money,” Smith naturally escalated the situation by pointing a handgun at them.
Because if you’re going to catch a felony charge over forty bucks worth of mediocre brew, you might as well go all out. But it’s Smith’s choice of a getaway vehicle that truly solidifies his spot in the Lubbock Hall of Fame. Rather than trying to blend into West Texas traffic, our guy hopped into a bright, neon-yellow PT Cruiser—Chrysler’s premier retro-design mistake painted the color of a radioactive banana.
Unsurprisingly, the Lubbock Police Department didn’t need to call in the FBI to crack this case. Instead of laying low and enjoying his stolen refreshments, Smith spent his post-heist victory lap driving around town pointing his pistol at random citizens, essentially treating the city like a grand theft auto simulation. Investigators picked him up shortly after, booking him into the Lubbock County Detention Center on a casual $203,000 bond for aggravated robbery, aggravated assault, fraud, and aggravated assault against a public servant.
You really have to wonder: was a night of drinking stolen beer worth a six-figure bond, or does merely sitting inside a yellow PT Cruiser naturally erase all capacity for human logic?
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