TORONTO — It was just a toy gun made out of Lego — or so Jeremy Bell thought when he ordered it off the Internet."The selling point on the website was the world's most realistic looking Lego gun," Bell said. Just how real — Bell was about to find out.
As he sat in his office Wednesday afternoon piecing together his new toy, a voice boomed from down the hallway, telling Bell to come out with his hands up.
"I'm standing with my hands on my head, and literally walking slowly back toward them," Bell said.
They were members of Toronto's Emergency Task Force, heavily armed with real guns.
"They pulled me in here, threw me against the wall," Bell said.
The ETF was responding to calls of a man in an office with a gun — tipped off by a nosy neighbour whose apartment overlooks Bell's office. The neighbour thought he saw a real pistol.
Toronto police said the response wasn't an over-reaction.
Const. Tony Vella said officers have good reason to respond to all gun calls.
"Calls like this you have to be safe, not sorry," Vella said. "Until we know it's not a gun, we have to take it seriously."
But even the police had to laugh at the fake weapon they eventually found. Bell was then released without charges.
Meanwhile, the sheepish neighbour appeared in the window holding up a message on Thursday: "Sorry," he wrote. "It looked real."
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
1 comment:
Nice. I actually read this on my favorite LEGO blog.
I had a friend in NYC who had the cops banging on his door one night because a neighbor across the street had seen my friend passed out on his bed and thought he was dead.
He told me the story all pissed off, not comprehending how someone could make that mistake, and shortly afterward conked out while sitting cross-legged in his desk chair with his head canted sharply sideways. He looked totally dead.
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