Food

Burglar Caught Making Surprisingly Good Fried Chicken In Woman’s House

If you tap the Workout button on your Apple Watch, you can track the calorie burn on a number of physical activities, including running outside, running on a treadmill, and toiling away on the elliptical machine. But Apple needs to add a “Breaking and Entering” option, because apparently, burglary is a hell of a workout.

When Samantha O’Neal recently walked into her home in Alachua County, Florida, she found alleged burglar Ronald Gregory Wesly standing at her stove, calmly frying a chicken and some sausage. Apparently picking locks is more taxing than it looks. Before O’Neal and her sister interrupted him, 34-year-old Wesly was making himself at home, using all of the available ingredients to make himself a meal and preemptively washing it all down with her booze.

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“He was in here, drunk as a skunk, just being Betty Crocker,” Melissa Stanley, O’Neal’s sister, told FOX 35.

The two women tossed Wesly out—presumably without a to-go bag—and called the police. Wesly was quickly apprehended in the area and is now facing felony charges of burglary and larceny. What he can’t be accused of, though, is being a bad cook. “My buddy had eaten [the chicken Wesly cooked],” O’Neal said. “He said it was seasoned very well.”

According to a recent New York Times report, eating at the scene of a crime is beyond common for burglars. It happens so frequently, the Times says, that it’s included in textbooks for police officers. “A burglar may take food from the kitchen or display other forms of aberrational behavior that help establish a modus operandi,” it says in “Criminal Investigation: A Method for Reconstructing the Past.”

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“I would assume, you’re a burglar, you have an adrenaline rush, you want to get in and out,” Detective Anthony Barbee told the Times. “But some people make themselves at home. They get comfortable.”

He’s not wrong. In January, Jacob Merchant was arrested in Youngstown, Ohio after a homeowner caught him in her house. He’d cooked himself a meal—he was actually identified by the egg cartons he’d left behind—and was in the woman’s shower when she got home. She ran to a nearby gas station to call the police and, thanks to security footage from the store where Merchant bought his eggs, he was later apprehended.

Last June, Diana Sove walked into her home in Whitestown, Indiana and found Roberto Pacheco and Gaudalupe Milian-Tinoco relaxing after cooking a meal (they did load the dishwasher, which was nice).

But the ultimate break-and-eat move happened in Washington, DC, when a man forced his way into an empty restaurant, fired up the grill, and fixed himself what looked like a burger. “He cooked food. I don’t know if he made a hamburger or not,” Officer Sean Hickman told the Washington Post . He also stole a bottle of water, because even criminals have to stay hydrated.

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If any burglars want to stop by and fix something for dinner, that’s kind of OK with me. Just leave some leftovers in the fridge, please.