The Associated Press
Louisville, Ky. (AP) -- Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson helped catch a couple of suspected thieves Monday night with help from his head of security.
Abramson was riding home accompanied by Bruce Siegel, a retired Louisville police officer who still carries a gun and a badge, when he spotted two men filling their truck with city-owned mulch.
“It was my first collar,” Abramson joked afterward. Both suspects now face misdemeanor theft charges.
It started as the mayor was returning from a speech at Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium when he and Siegel, who sometimes drives Abramson, exited Interstate 64 and saw two men in the median loading a small pickup with bags of mulch that had been left there to spruce up a Brightsite, one of the small plots of flowers around metro Louisville.
Abramson said he wondered at first if the two were city workers, but he and
Siegel deduced they were watching a heist. Siegel turned around, flipped on the blue lights and siren and pulled up behind the truck, Abramson said.
The men pulled over, and Siegel approached the car, showed them his badge and made the men drive back to the median where the mulch had been taken, and forced them to unload it, Abramson said.
While Siegel stayed with the two men, Abramson flagged down a metro police officer who arrested Justan Reisert, 25, of Clarksville, Ind., and Robert Davis, 22, of New Albany, Ind., at 7:15 p.m. EDT on charges of theft by unlawful taking.
The two, who according to police reports own a landscaping business, will be arraigned Thursday in Jefferson District Court. Both were released without b ond.
Reisert and Davis could not be reached for comment. According to the arrest reports, both men told police they thought the bags had fallen off the back of a truck and didn’t realize the bark was government property.