While we were sleeping

Sunday morning before dawn, a pastor noticed an unfamiliar car with Wyoming plates in his church's parking lot. Thinking this odd, he called LPD. Two officers responded, and contacted a young man laying in the back seat with a suspicious story. He claimed he had come to Nebraska to visit a friend from Omaha who was supposedly in Lincoln on Saturday night. He had visited her for only one hour, and was now just napping in his car before beginning his trip back home.

In response to a question, he said that he was on probation for burglary, but that his probation officer was aware of his out of state travel. He consented to a search of the vehicle, which turned up nothing suspicious, but his explanation for his presence in Lincoln didn't make much sense. He left the lot at the officers' request. As he was leaving, one of the officers found him with a Google news search, named in a 2012 article about the arrest of a group of men for a series of over 40 burglaries in his home state.

Although he had not violated any laws that they knew of, one of the officers decided it wouldn't hurt to drive in the same direction that he claimed to be heading for a while. Our visitor meandered a bit, eventually continuing west on I-80. In the meantime, In the meantime, the second officer checked the surrounding neighborhoods for anything amiss, watchful for any lost travelers who might be afoot in the vicinity.

The car was registered to the driver's mom, who was contacted later and was not aware that her son had visited our fair city. Neither were the police back home, who offered to pass the information on to his probation officer, in the event that his trip was in violation of his probation order.

Such is the nature of police work that occurred in the wee hours on Sunday, while we were sleeping.