Find Posts By Topic

Man Arrested For Spitting That Hot Fire

If Smokey the Bear, Beavis and Frankenstein have taught us anything, it’s that fire bad!

Officers tried to relay this same lesson to a less-than-receptive 22-year-old man Saturday night after they caught him spewing flames from his mouth on a busy Capitol Hill street.

Officers Sandlin Grayson and Christopher James were working an emphasis patrol in the Pike/Pine corridor around 10:30 PM when they spotted a four-foot plume of flame shooting over a crowd of people in the 900 block of E. Pike Street.

As officers moved toward the stream of fire they discovered the flames were coming from the 22-year-old man’s mouth.

Officers Grayson and James explained to the man that he was creating a risk for people on the street and asked him to curtail his human torch routine.

The man refused (“in one ear, out the other,” he told them) and declined to tell officers his name, though he did reveal that he lacked a business license and street use permit.

Officers became concerned with they saw the man manipulating the can of butane and lighter in his hands and asked him to turn them over. Again, he refused, and struggled with officers when they attempted to wrest the can from his grasp. After securing the can of gas, they arrested the 22-year-old for reckless endangerment and booked him into the King County Jail.