A few days ago, a 20-year-old named Zachary Kingsbury got pulled over for speeding. Since he was 20 and likely not the sharpest tool in the shed, he left a bunch of meth and weed out in plain sight. When the cops noticed them, he took off running. He ran directly into the ocean, thinking that he could swim away (not the sharpest tool). Instead of getting their badges wet, the Surf City Police Department, put a drone in the air to follow him. And guess what was in the water with our young criminal friend? Shark!
When I was 17-years-old, I was an idiot. Not quite Kingsbury dumb–I stayed away from the meth–but pretty dumb. I assume that most 17-year-old boys are; we’re driven by nothing more than lust and some misguided sense of bravado, after all, and we spend our teenage years hoping for a glimpse of boob and thinking that chicks dig bad boys. Near our high school, there was a life-sized statue of a killer whale, made from cement and bolted to a concrete block atop a small hill outside of a restaurant. At around 3 a.m. on a May morning, along with eleven other idiots, I unbolted the whale and tried to move it into the back of a waiting pickup truck. Of course, since it was a life-sized statue of a whale made from cement, it weighed roughly 5,000 pounds and we were only able to shift it enough to roll it onto its side, where it promptly broke one of its fins off. We struggled for a while, twelve idiot drunk teens, giggling in the dirt heaving mightily at this immovable object. It was then that the restaurant’s chef showed up to work. He, of course, saw a bunch of drunk idiots vandalizing the whale statue and called the cops. They showed up, we ran away into a nearby park, and then spent a very enjoyable morning hiding under cars and sprinting through people’s lawns until we were all caught. One of us went into the ocean, but it was too cold to actually swim, so he stood there for a minute while the cops laughed at him. Then he waded back to shore to shiver in the back of a cop car. He did not see a shark.
Zachary Kingsbury–possibly because he was high on meth–did not have a carefree jaunt through a neighborhood park. He swam straight out to sea for an hour. For a while there, he shared his little section of ocean with a curious shark but seemed entirely unaware of its presence. Then, since he was probably high on meth and, like I said, a very dull tool, he swam too far.
Zachary Kingsbury, possibly not a very sharp tool.
“After 60 minutes of flight time, Kingsbury was over 4,000 feet offshore and visual contact was lost,” the North Carolina Police said in a statement to the Charlotte Observer. “At that point, the operation became a rescue operation.”
The cops called the coast guard, who probably laughed with each other about the absurdity of Kingsbury’s stupidity. At around 8 p.m., some 4 hours after Kingsbury ran into the ocean, the Coast Guard collected him at North Topsail Beach. He was taken to Pender County jail and charged with charged with resisting arrest, obstructing an officer, and possession of drug paraphernalia, methamphetamine, and marijuana up to half an ounce.
