Keep Bailing

There’s a new crime wave in LA — geriatric taggers!  Sheriff’s deputies recently arrested a 73-year-old local man for allegedly putting slap tags — stickers with a printed message — inside MTA buses and stations.

Perhaps the aged tagger had had it with ‘teenage tagger-hooligans and their misspellings and their naughty language’.  He certainly showed those ‘young whipper-slappers’ a thing or two by eluding deputies for over half a year.  Witness descriptions of an old man seen around LA’s Westside, plastering orange and black stickers that asked “Who Is John Scott?”  deepened the mystery.

According to the Los Angeles Times, deputies answered his question on November 13, when they caught an elderly vandal, named (what else?) John Scott, in a main transit hub, stickers in hand.  “We knew our guy was older — but not 73!” said Sheriff’s Lt. Erik Ruble.

Scott had stickers stuffed in his pockets and a briefcase that matched one in photos he’d posted on his very own whoisjohnscott.com website.  The site featured a man disguised in black with a question mark superimposed over his face, seated happily under web copy that read: “Who am I?  John Scott — world traveler, entrepreneur, producer, but, above all, mystery — an ordinary man with an extraordinary idea of himself.”   Apparently, Scott was chasing the same dream many do in LA:  fame.  (Or at least, hobbling behind the dream, shaking his cane and yelling at it to stay off his lawn — nobody knows for sure).

According to deputies, he was agile for a man his age.  Many of his stickers were found in hard-to-reach spots and equipment had to be dismantled in order to remove them. Scott was taken to the Los Angles County jail where he was held on charges of felony vandalism at $20,000 bail.

Photocredit: Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department