Driver Jailed After Taking Nickel's Worth of Electricity

Cops say he plugged into school's juice without permission
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Suggested by user99
Posted Dec 4, 2013 3:42 PM CST
Driver Jailed After Taking Nickel's Worth of Electricity
A public car-charging station off Interstate 90 in Washington state.   (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Here's a weird twist in the brave new world of electric cars: A driver ended up in jail on theft charges after plugging into a school's outlet without permission. The kicker: He got maybe 5 cents worth of juice for his trouble, reports 11Alive. The mess began when Kaveh Kamooneh drove to his son's middle school in Chamblee, Ga., to watch his kid play tennis. He spotted an exterior outlet and plugged in his Nissan Leaf, only to get stopped by a police officer after about 20 minutes.

The officer filed a report, and police showed up on Kamooneh's doorstep 11 days later to arrest him. He then spent 15 hours in jail. Kamooneh acknowledges he didn't ask permission to juice up, but he adds that it was a Saturday morning and nobody was around. "A theft is a theft," says an unsympathetic police sergeant. Maybe so, but "if electric cars are to become more commonplace, so too must locations for emergency booster charges," observes Lindsay Abrams at Salon. (More weird crimes stories.)

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