“Stabbed With A Chicken Bone”: 25 Unhinged Things Cops Have Experienced

After all we've seen on television, we have a fair understanding of what a police officer's job entails. Just like any other job, things are fairly routine for the most part. Once in a way however, law-enforcers find themselves in the midst of some bizarre action. Redditors who knew a cop, or were a cop, shared their personal stories that touch on the not-so-glamourous aspects, intrigues, crazies, and rookie mistakes while on the job. We aren't talking about chasing criminals, high-speed chases, or hostage situations. Rather, these tales refer to heartbreaking revelations and unusual incidents when the unexpected got multiplied with the weird. The plots just keep on twisting in these stories, and we dare you to attempt to predict what will happen next.

#1

Image source: dogballtaster, Hans Isaacson/unsplash (not the actual photo) Showed up to a call once about a baby crying nonstop for hours and no sign of an adult being home. We went into the house and I followed the sound of the crying baby upstairs to find an 18 month old with her arms duct taped to her crib. I undid the duct tape and it was obvious this was not the first time it had happened. I brought the child downstairs and outside. The mom was walking up the sidewalk of the housing unit and flipped s**t on me. I handed the child off to a patrol and cuffed her. It was the most satisfying clicking of handcuffs I had ever heard. Edit: This happened when I was in the Army as an MP. The father of the child was deployed at the time. From what I heard, he was granted permission to return home and take custody of the child. They got a divorce and I believe he won custody. I don’t know what happened to her as far as a sentencing or jail time.

#2

Image source: Wolfhound1142, George Dagerotip/ Unsplash Definitely the time that an older, mentally ill woman tried to burn her house down because she believed that was the only way to disarm the atom bomb in her attic. I got her to walk with me to my car and get in the back by telling her it was the only place she'd be safe. When I got in and started driving, she started yelling that I couldn't take her to jail because she hadn't done anything wrong. I calmly informed her that we were going to the hospital, which prompted even louder yelling of, "I'm not crazy!" I replied, "I don't think you're crazy." She screamed, "Then why are you taking me to the hospital?!" I told her, "Well, you were next to that atom bomb, right? We gotta get you checked for radiation poisoning." Her eyes got wide and she said, "Oh s**t! I didn't think about that, you better hurry!"

#3

Image source: abbrollher, cottonbro studio/pexels (not the actual photo) Not a cop, but a cop friend of mind in SE Washington, DC. He got a domestic disturbance call and arrived to a calm scene. The husband explained he and his wife had been arguing, and that she had gone over the top, but they were both fine now. The wife confirmed the story, but stated she didn’t want the husband back in the house that night. My friend asked if the husband had a place to go, and he agreed to go to his mother’s house for the night. The husband left, then my friend and his partner left soon after. About an hour later, they get a call back to the same house. When they get there, the husband is in the kitchen dead. The wife explains that right after the police left, her husband came back and resumed arguing with her. He got in her face and she stabbed in the neck with a chicken bone, hitting his carotid artery.

#4

Image source: j2142b, cottonbro studio/pexels (not the actual photo) First time my brother arrested someone was really funny. He and his training officer were working the graveyard shift and got a call for suspicious activity at a house. They arrive and the homeowner says they're is someone sneaking around his house that shouldn't be there. So they start looking around with their flashlights, grass is really overgrown in the backyard and my brother notice one of those Fisher Price kid's car (yellow & red plastic car) moving on its own. They found their guy, naked and high AF trying to hide under the kids toy and crawl away. Training officer says,"Well, he's yours rookie", had my brother cuff him (guy didn't want to go to jail and put up a naked fight) and take the guy to jail.

#5

Image source: ratsoh I babysat for a cop (2 toddler daughters)(10/10 kids, cute and very affectionate) and he told me of one story where he was called to this old lady’s home. When they got there they found her husbands rotting body under a pile of newspapers. So apparently the lady had really bad dementia and had thought the husband was a robber and hit him in the back of the head with a rolling pin. The poor dementia lady went back to bed and he was dead in the morning. She didn’t know what to do, so she covered his body with newspapers and somehow managed to survive on her own for a few days. A neighbor started to worry and came to check up on them. The neighbor was the one to call the police. That story haunted me for like a month....

#6

Image source: LeCharlesMuhDickens, Behnam Norouzi/unsplash (not the actual photo) Sharing on behalf of my friend who isn’t on reddit, but I showed him this thread and he wanted to tell the story because it’s funny as f**k. So he’s a deputy in rural Louisiana, what follows are 100% his words. Responded to a call from an elderly man who lived outside of town in a nice little house near a pretty dense area of swamp. Dispatch said he was having some trouble with his stove, was hungry, and didn’t know who else to call. So two of us head out there and we’re greeted by a nice, but clearly a little off, older black gentleman. We ask him what’s wrong with the stove, thinking we just need to light the pilot or something, and he shows us inside. House is well kept, but has a lot of spiritual stuff around. So we get to the kitchen and the stove is chained shut, clearly not going to involve lighting a pilot or flipping a breaker. Dude has a chain, a padlock, and a bunch of rope holding the stove closed. He proceeds to tell us there’s a demon in the stove, he doesn’t want it to get into the house, so he’s locked the oven door so it can’t escape. He asks if we’ll take it out to the waters edge and let the demon go. We played along, carried the stove outside and rolled it down to a creek bank on a cart, a short distance from the house. He’s inside watching out the window as we unchain the door and let the “demon” out. We roll it back up to the house, plug it back in, and he thanks us like a hundred times since he can now cook again without worrying about the demon in the stove. We stop by to check in on him now since we know he’s out there alone, and he’s honestly a pretty cool dude, just really into spiritual/voodoo type stuff. Nice guy though, and we’ve now bonded over letting a demon out of the stove. By far one of the strangest calls I’ve ever been on.

#7

Image source: madiison1461, Rosemary Ketchum/pexels (not the actual photo) Not a cop, my dad was. Was backing up a situation where guy allegedly was shooting up on the street. When he came over, guy was arguing with the officer on scene, definitely not being aggressive in any way, or suspicious though. Long story short, the other two officers on scene got aggressive with him and grabbed him and slammed him multiple times into a car parked on the street and he had the get 67 stitches. My dad told the chief and ended up having to quit since everyone was pissed at him for doing so.

#8

Image source: Risin_bison, Andrea Piacquadio/pexels (not the actual photo) Responded with my partner to a welfare check on an elderly gentleman. Knocked on the door, walked in and couldn’t find him. Went to his garage and found him sound asleep behind the wheel. He tried to commit s*****e by asphyxiation. Thing is, he only had a small amount of fuel and it was a new Civic. He was pissed when he woke up that I wasn’t St Peter.

#9

Image source: tr_ns_st_r, Clay LeConey/unsplash (not the actual photo) My dad usually relates two when people ask; 1. Staking out one of LA's homeless k**lers, the Skid Row Stabber. This one specifically targeted men who appeared to be homeless. So my dad was part of a taskforce that would assign one officer a night to be the bait. He remembers tearing up his clothes, putting them on, rolling around in the dirt, then on the street, and finally pouring a cheap bottle of whiskey out on them. He never washed this outfit so that it just got progressively nastier while he was on the taskforce. He would then lie down in one of the k**ler's known preferred areas, with his backup revolver (because of its size) underneath his body. He said he did actually manage to fall asleep a couple times, but mostly, even knowing there were a handful of nearby officers hidden and waiting for him to start screaming, he was too scared to do anything but lie there and shiver. 2. When he was a supervisor one of LA's endless car pursuits entered his division's territory. His officers joined the chase, and then entered a new division as it kept going. He knew the supervisor of that division's patrol so he hopped in a car to head over and help co-ordinate the chase. By the time he got there, the chase had turned to a foot chase. He radioed the other supervisor to meet him in the station parking lot as he listened to officers calling out updates on location. He had a gut feeling, and as he and the supervisor listened, started walking towards one of the walls. Sure enough, the suspect, completely lost, hopped over the fence. "Literally caught the guy in my arms as he came over." I'll add a few others I know to be nutty but he never gives out because of various reasons. 1. The King/92 Riots. He was stationed at the infamous Rampart station when these occurred as a patrol supervisor. We didn't see him for roughly a month, as he was often in the field managing a small group of officers who would move from one intersection to another, mounting high visibility defense for 24+ hours to discourage rioting. This job amounted to them finding a 'high ground' they could park the patrol cars in, half the officers would then stand around the cars in tactical gear while the other half slept in the cars. 2. Frankly, I'd say his entire 9 years at Rampart were insane. The whole Rampart Scandal broke out during his time there and he obviously knew and worked with most of them at some point, I knew a few of them from spending a lot of time at the station/LAPD get-togethers. Some of the most surreal b******t happened as part of this scandal (and the movie is a god d**n travesty not just for that meme worthy AMA, but the fact it didn't tackle the wild s**t that went down). 3. Prior to Rampart he did a stint with air division. He relates that often as the officer, he would be strapped in to a harness and then would step out of the helicopter while it was flying, and would stand on the landing skid, leaning out until the harness supported him. (This was 83-86). He spent most of the LA Summer Olympics like this. 4. The one shooting he speaks about was a situation that unfortunately isn't the rarest for police, but scares the p**s out of me to think about, and added to my father's existing PTSD issues from Vietnam. He and his partner were called to a domestic dispute, the neighbors called in because it was getting louder than usual. They parked on the street at the end of the driveway to the home, and the moment they exited the car, the man pushed his wife and two kids out the door on the end of a shotgun. They all proceeded to have a shouting match while the man continued to hold his wife and kids at gun point. They were pleading of course for him to put it down, let them go, and everything could be sorted out peacefully then. He wasn't having it. During the argument, the man pointed the shotgun at my father and his partner and fired at them. My dad and his partner returned fire at the same time. My dad ended the story there for many years, saying "The man died there, either my shot or my partners connected." My mother filled in the blanks - the partner's shot went high, my dad's got him in the chest, just below the shoulder. He was dead before EMTs arrived. About twenty years afterwards he finally opened up about the PTSD he had from this incident - "We were right, and every day I think about it, there's nothing I would change about what we did. Given all the circumstances, it was the right decision. If he was willing to attempt to gun down the police, we couldn't know what would happen to his family after he had shot us. Still, I shot him and k**led him while his wife and young kids stood right next to him. They might someday understand why I did what I did, might understand what a bad person their dad was - but I still k**led their dad, right in front of them." Now that I'm a father too, I get exactly where he's coming from and why he can't shake the circumstances, even though he is convinced he did the best he could with the situation.

#10

Image source: xfilesarereal, Kindel Media/pexels (not the actual photo) Dad tells the story of a guy he knew who kept getting caught for writing bad checks. He was such a big guy he wouldn’t fit in the police car so they would just meet him at the magistrate office and write him tickets. (I know, some trust) but a year or so after this kept happening, he got a call that there was a domestic dispute at the house. So they rush over there and he’s got an axe in his hand sitting on the front porch all bloody. They approach and tell him to put the axe down which he does and proceeded to tell them that his wife is in the bathtub, or at least her head is. But guy was completely open and cooperative, didn’t run or anything. Asked if he could meet them at the magistrate office and dad was like yeah nah dawg you’re gonna have to get in the car this time.

#11

Image source: nforcr, syda_productions/freepik (not the actual photo) On a hot midnight in The Bronx about 330 am got a burg call . Me and my partner found it strange when central gave us the address because it was a funeral home . We arrive on scene of this brownstone building and immediately see the basement lights are on . We look at each other and say “no way ... someone actually broke in here????” So we enter through what is an open door and begin to clear each room of the funeral home/ house. When we reach the basement and open what is a brightly lit body prep storage and prep room we are immediately confronted with several bodies on tables covered in different stages of undress with bed sheets on them . Our attention is drawn to a very startled naked man holding playing cards . I look at him and simply say “What the f**k and who the f**k are you?? He looks at me and my partner and nervously responds ... “I’m the Mortician” .... wait .... “Who are you?? And what the f**k are you doing??? “I’m the mortician and I’m working and playing cards “ “Playing cards ??? My partner says ... “Yeah cards ...see????”... holding his hands out displaying the deck of cards I look around and see each of the 4-5 bodies have their own hands dealt to them ... We asked for His ID .... verified he belonged there and proceeded to leave with a queasy feeling laughing out a*ses off. My partner looks at me and says how should we mark this job.... ???? Best job in the world..... I miss the clowns but not the circus...

#12

Image source: alwaysmyfault, Vitaliy Haiduk/pexels (not the actual photo) Not a police officer, but I know one. I'm sure he has a million stories, but my favorite that he's told me was the time he was called to a local Mexican restaurant. When he arrived, he was directed to a Cadillac in the parking lot that was a rockin, if you get my drift. He knocks on the window, and a butt a*s naked 80 year old woman gets out, pissed off that someone interrupted her getting laid. Her 80 year old husband was laying naked in the vehicle still. This old woman stood outside of her vehicle, completely naked, for a solid 5 minutes, arguing w my friend about how she should be able to get laid whenever she wants. There was more to the story of course, but as I'm not the first hand story teller, I can't do the story the proper justice it deserves. He didn't arrest them, even though she stood naked outside for 5 minutes, so she got off easy (pun intended).

#13

Image source: anon, cottonbro studio/pexels (not the actual photo) I know a guy, who was a cop in Texas when I was in middle school. He told me about this one time this woman called 911 because her house was haunted. He preceded to put handcuffs on an invisible "ghost" and acted like he was putting it in the police car.

#14

When I was little, we lived on a main avenue in a small town. My (then a police officer) dad had serious anger problems with people speeding on our street. Like instant screaming, red faced, throwing rocks anger. He would always write their plates down and call them in to our local PD. My brother and I would joke about it all the time. Years later when I was in college my dad told me a story. One hot summer day he was riding shotgun in an unmarked car looking for someone who had just robbed a store. They passed a group of kids playing ball on the sidewalk. A moment later he heard a loud bang, looked in the rearview, and saw one of the kids flying straight up into the air. Someone had been speeding up the street and slammed into the kid who had stepped off the curb to get their ball. My dad’s partner turned the car around and my dad called in for an ambulance. By the time they pulled up, another car had already driven right over the kid and stopped. The kid’s head was pinned between the muffler and the street. So they got every able-bodied man on the block to come and lift the car up on one side so they could slide the kid out. But when they did his head was falling apart. Dad said he was holding the top of the kid’s skull on with one hand, and that his torso sounded like there was broken glass inside. He just held him and told him to hang in there, but the kid died in his arms before the ambulance even arrived. This all happened when my brother and I were about the same age. Some days when my dad got home from work he would come and immediately hug my brother and I. I’m guessing this was one of those days. Image source: Dracula_Batman

#15

Image source: -eDgAR-, Ahmet Kurt/unsplash (not the actual photo) I knew this kid in high school who got pulled over for a minor traffic violation. He decides it would be funny to jump out of the car and book it down the street. The cops of course go chasing after him and after a couple of blocks he stops, turns around with his hands in the air, and yells, "Psych!" The cops didn't find it as funny as he did and they tackled him to ground and put him under arrest. I just can't imagine how crazy that must have been for the cops having someone flee like that and then turn around suddenly. This was before smartphones amd YouTube pranksters, so the kid was just doing it because he was an idiot. He came from a wealthy family though and didn't even end up in that much trouble for it.

#16

Not really crazy but the one that stuck with me. Context, my dad had a heart attack when I was 13 and I was so panic struck at the time I couldn’t do anything but watch. If it weren’t for my stepmom calling an ambulance, he likely would’ve died. I responded to a call in a building in a corporate business district for a man who collapsed at work and is unresponsive. Go inside, see a 50s-ish year old man on the ground who had turned a white-ish blue. About 25 people were sorrounding him while one person was *attempting* to do CPR. I stepped in immediately, no pulse, and began CPR. As I began, I broke his ribs (indicating guy who was doing CPR before me was likely doing it incorrectly). After a little over 10 minutes straight of me doing CPR, I finally obtained a pulse. After 15 MINUTES of doing CPR, paramedics arrive (this was an excruciatingly long response time for my city). They begin hooking up their automatic CPR rig and begin medicating. They transported him to the nearest hospital where he passed due to a lack of oxygen to his brain. The entire time I was doing CPR, all I could do was see my dad. I was doing what I should have done for him to a complete stranger. I looked at his pale body and saw my dad laying their, dying. Every cop deals with different calls differently, both at the scene, and mentally after. This one personally wrenched me. Image source: Justinx1997

#17

Image source: Zipp3r1986, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo) This is a bad story. Keep that in mind: It was night, about 4 years ago. We got a call when we were about to leave. We decided to pick up before handing over to the next shift. Apparently a man was trying to commit s*****e by clinging to a power pole. Just before arriving at the scene the light of the whole city went out. Total blackout. Then we arrived at the place in question and saw a scene that I knew on that occasion that I would never forget. A man literally frying over the power pole... The man was on fire: face, thighs, torso, practically the whole body. The head had "exploded" and was dripping brain mass on the floor ... terrible stuff... I don't think I encountered anything that had top this up until this day...

#18

Image source: Evening-Macaroon, Kampus Production/pexels (not the actual photo) My mom has been a police officer for quite some time now (over 10 years i guess) and she had this habit of giving her personal phone number for emergencies. One time, some crazy woman called her telling her that she keeps seeing green orbs on the wall and that the government wants to expose her to radiation so the aliens could take her.

#19

Image source: Lockerd, Andy Quezada/unsplash (not the actual photo) I ain't a cop, but my dad is, and this happened when I was on a ridealong with him quite a few years ago....relatively short one this time. After eating our lunch, we went down to a runoff point so he could finish some of his reports (that's usually why you see a lot of cops on the side somewhere that isn't directly connected to the main road), I was on my phone watching some videos, when he got called in to check something that was happening up the road. I was sitting in the car the entire time this happened. Headed up the road to a construction site (by that time it had been active but non-progressing for five years), where a bunch of people were just standing around looking weird...dressed in weird suits and obvious fake construction costumes with fake hardhats. A representative of the construction company had called the police down when these people showed up and didn't say a single thing for hours, backup arrived and about six cops were trying to get two dozen people to say anything. After a half hour passed, every single one of the trespassers began to dance and music began to blare from portable speakers, it went on until the song ended, at which point one of the dancers stood up and said "Danielle , Kyle has an important question for you". Everyone was motionless until the person who stood up started looking around and asked if either of those people were there. It took another five minutes before a threat of arresting everyone came to head and got the speaker to finally begin talking about what was going on, turns out someone had hired a flash mob crew (they were a bigger thing back then) for a marriage proposal, but no one showed up. After all of that was done, my dad found out that the person who hired the flash mob did so to rob a jewelry store up the road and assumed that the flash mob would draw all the police to the site, not having enough intelligence to realize a flash mob trespassing on a mostly empty machine free yard wouldn't rank higher than an armed robbery of a jewelry store. The guy was clever in a "yes yes yes, no" kind of way, the idea was logical but the e*******n and targets were absolute dogshit, he bragged about it, and was stupid enough to think that saying "you can't prove the flash mob was me!"....when literally no one asked him about the flash mob, he was smart but also extremely dumb. His name was actually Kyle, his wife is actually named Danielle, and he paid the flash mob crew with his own money...dumb. I would pay to have a video of his lawyers face, I doubt it was a fun day for them.

#20

Image source: Bigbadballer88, Abhinav Bhardwaj/unsplash (not the actual photo) My dad's friend who is a cop in NC told me that some teen tried to steal an electric shopping cart from Target with a f**k ton of s**t in it and tried to outrun the cops but the cart only went 5mph for like 25 meters then the battery died. The cop just asked him to push the cart back since it died and return the stolen items.

#21

Wasn't me, but an ex-cop that I used to work with told me he once got a call about a gorilla on a street corner in Boston. He thought it was a joke until he actually got there and saw the freakin' gorilla that escaped from a zoo. Image source: masterjon_3

#22

Image source: Vroomped, Alan Hardman/unsplash (not the actual photo) Not a police officer, dad was.The weirdest one that comes to mind is a guy SCREAMING at the top of his lungs, in public threatening to order a pizza. Yup, you heard it right. Stomping in traffic, yelling at passers by, and why because he wants to order food. Dad never found out what was wrong with him except he was not on d***s.

#23

Image source: SgtSavage1106, Getty Images/unsplash (not the actual photo) Answered a disturbance call to find a drunk dude climbing in a car while his wife screamed at him. She smacked his windshield with a bat, destroying it as he peeled out. We followed him maybe .5 mile with the sirens and lights while he drove with his head out the window Ace Ventura style. Poor b*****d didn’t get his head back inside in time passing a UPS truck and his head pieces ended up on my windshield.

#24

While serving in South Korea, my team was on patrol in the local drinking village when we heard someone drunkenly singing the US national anthem. At a loss for where this individual was, we finally looked up and there he was....tight rope walking on the ledge of a building 3 stories up. This is when precision of language is of vital importance...especially when dealing with a drunk. The sergeant on scene said, "Hey, come down here!" The drunkard said, "On my way!" And proceeded to step off. Under the impression I was about to witness my first death, I was in shock. Through some bit of weird luck/science, he glanced the hood of a slightly misted Daewoo truck and slid down to the ground. We ran over to him and he said, "Hey guys, how's it going?" He had open fractures on both femurs and after some makeshift splinting and controlling the bleeding, he was transported to the nearest hospital. Soju is a hell of a thing. Image source: anon

#25

A sheriff I know recalled the story of being a rookie. Had a decomp body at the bottom of a ravine from a car crash. Since he was the rookie, he got the bottom of the bag on the climb back up. This was back in the 70's, so technology of zippers wasn't up to the task at hand. While huffing it up the side of the hill, the juices started swishing back and forth. Some made it out of a gap in the zipper. Said sheriff was in the middle of filling his lungs with cool crisp air. Large glob of dead guy juice bullseye's directly in his mouth.... 40 years later, he can still taste it... Image source: nmlind406