Usually when a thief tries stealing something, the goal is to nab something precious that they normally would not be able to have or afford under ordinary circumstances.
You do occasionally have people who do it just to test their skills and the local security, but it still often results with valuable goods going missing.
But what if you, as the thief, misidentify your intended target?
Peter Hans Emery, a 56-year-old man from Florida, had been arrested on the 24th of January for stealing some pills from someone’s personal lockbox.
Drug addicts can do some really crazy things in their chase for a high, so the idea of breaking into a house for a handful of pills isn’t really too wild in that context.
When Emery snuck into a residential home on Lake Allen Drive in Pinellas Park, he had been meaning to nab some opioid pills – specifically hydrocodone acetaminophen, a type of medication known to be an extremely powerful narcotic.
It is easy to see why he would want some – although incredibly useful and indispensable in the medical field, narcotics include the likes of morphine and heroin.
These are drugs that are already well-known to be highly addictive.
It is no wonder he is hoping these pills would feed that addiction.
There was just one tiny problem – those weren’t the precious hydrocodone pills he had walked away with.
What Emery hadn’t realised was that the pill bottle had been mislabelled.
In reality, the pills inside were actually just Equate Gentle Laxatives!
So all that effort to swipe a fistful of the supposed “opioids” turned out to be completely useless.
It got him into trouble too – as it turned out, Emery had been caught red-handed on camera breaking and stealing from his victim’s lock box.
According to Emery, he later admitted to the police he was guilty of stealing the pills, but says that he threw them away once he realised what they were.
He even retrieved two of the stolen pills from his trash as proof.
Presumably, he found out what his stolen goods really were the hard way, since he had no way of knowing otherwise.
Already a man with an extensive rap sheet, the police needed no further encouragement to swoop in and arrest Emery.
He has since been booked into the Pinellas County Jail, and as it turns out, this isn’t the first time he has done something like this.
He now faces several probation violation charges due to the fact that he had previously stolen a painkiller called Dilaudid.
This is all on top of the various offenses he had done previously, including burglary, resisting arrest, auto theft, grand theft, cocaine possession, and failure to appear in court.
He may have already done his combined 28 months of service in state prison for those previous offenses, but it is likely the judge and jury will not look kindly on him for relapsing into the habit.
Here is to hoping that whatever the result may be of his hearing, he will finally learn his lesson.
