A fugitive from Tampa faced a dilemma as he sat in the backseat of a police cruiser in Tallmadge, Ohio, a suburb of Akron.
Kirk Kelly, didn’t want police to discover his true identity because he was wanted on firearms and drug charges back in Florida.
Police had pulled over the car he was traveling in and thought they smelled drugs. So Kelly and several other people in the car were placed in the back of a cruiser without handcuffs.
Kelly had given officers a false name, police said, but he realized that eventually he could be identified by his fingerprints.
So, by one, he chewed off the tips of his fingers, according to police.
The self-mutilated fugitive was later identified by police, anyway, when authorities in Florida were able to identify his tattoos. He was held on charges of resisting arrest and evidence tampering, among other charges, according to the Associated Press.
Kelly wasn’t the first Floridian to try that trick.
A few months earlier in Fort Myers, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office released a video showing another fugitive, 20-year-old Kenzo Roberts, in the back of a cruiser, biting his fingertips and rubbing them raw on the grate separating the driver and passenger/prisoner seats.
The video has received tens of thousands of views on YouTube. Maybe that’s where Kelly got the idea.
But it didn’t work for Roberts, either.
STRANGE FACT: The first murder conviction in the United States based on a fingerprint happened in 1910.
