Sticks, Fists, and Open Foolishness in Carson City

In the capital of the Silver State, where one might hope civilization had taken root a bit deeper than the sagebrush, deputies found themselves busier than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs this past week.

First, there’s a fellow named Perry Adams, age forty-six. He figured a quarrel with his girlfriend about his flirtations on Instagram would best be resolved not with words–but with a stick.

Deputies were called to a modest home on Dori Way after reports of a disturbance. They found the victim—shaky, whispering, and nodding her head in a fashion that suggested she wasn’t so much answering questions as warning them without words.

Invited into the house, a rare courtesy in these parts when tempers are up, they found Adams, who looked as innocent as a schoolboy caught with a slingshot. The woman told deputies that Adams had gotten hisself worked up over accusations of conversing with a minor online, then suffering righteous indignation, deleted the app, no doubt to spare himself the aggravation and the possibility of the burden of evidence.

Despite claiming no harm had come of it, the woman bore the badge of battle—a red, raised welt upon her arm—and further confessed, once her fear loosened her tongue, that Adams had struck her across the face with his hand and then walloped her with a stick held in both hands like a man splitting kindling. There was choking involved as Adams had pressed his forearm against her throat in the manner of a man attempting to hush an unpleasant truth.

The beating, for good measure, was delivered while a child slept elsewhere in the house, blissfully unaware of the foolishness of grown folk. Deputies, not being entirely born yesterday, arrested Adams on the charge of felony domestic battery with a deadly weapon and confiscated both the sticks and the phone, which Adams pretended he could no longer access.

No sooner had the dust settled from that escapade than the deputies got summoned to Como Street, where a 22-year-old woman decided that if love couldn’t find restoration by persuasion, it might get revived through violence.

The young lady, suspecting her former sweetheart of infidelity with a man—a curious complaint for an ex-girlfriend to make—barged into the woman’s bedroom and delivered a punch to the face hard enough to leave a cut and the early bloom of a black eye. She was thoughtful enough to keep her sister on speakerphone during the assault, a detail which proved about as helpful to her case as a screen door on a submarine.

In her defense—stitched together with the kind of care usually reserved for secondhand quilts—the ex-girlfriend claimed she got smacked first, though she could not recall which hand had done the deed. Deputies, using the effective method of common sense, determined that the victim, not the aggressor, had summoned the law and that the injuries spoke louder than the accused. Thus, the ex-girlfriend got herself arrested for domestic battery.

In Carson City as elsewhere, while love may lift some to the stars, it just as often drops us flat on our faces.