East Hampton
An Austin Road woman walked into police headquarters on the afternoon of Dec. 3 to say she’d been scammed out of $1,500. She’d received a call that morning, she said, from a man claiming to work for PSEG, who told her the utility had not received payment for her last bill and would be cutting off her service. She thought she’d paid her minimum balance the week before, but the caller was able to provide the total amount she owed and her account number. He instructed her to go to CVS and send money, using eCash, to keep her service going, which she did, completing three separate transactions of about $500 each. When the caller then said she had to send more money, she realized she’d been scammed. She’d already filed fraud claims with CVS and eCash, she said, and provided the receipts. Police searched an internal database for the caller’s number without success, but the investigation remains active.
East Hampton Village
A caller reported a “suspicious package” near the westbound Jitney Stop on Main Street Saturday afternoon, describing it as a suitcase that had been left next to a garbage can. When police arrived, an 89-year-old woman standing next to the suitcase informed them that it was hers.
Montauk
Police were called to a dispute at Avallone Apartments in the early hours of Dec. 1 and spoke to the building’s manager, who stated that a fire alarm had gone off in one of the units, but when he went to check it out, its “highly agitated” tenant started yelling at him and calling him names. The tenant told the officers that her apartment smelled like smoke because her neighbor smoked cigarettes. The officers were unable to detect an odor during their visit, and advised her to file a complaint with the complex in the morning. She said she intended to.
Sag Harbor
A 911 call from a man identifying himself as “Jason Bourne” prompted a welfare check on the afternoon of Dec. 3. He’d been in a car with his sister but disapproved of her driving, he told police, and took her wallet and duffel bag with him when he got out of the car on Main Street, where officers met him. He said he was a “10-Star general in the Navy,” a “five-star transit authority superior” in the city, a “five-star detective sergeant in the N.Y.P.D.,” and held numerous other high-ranking positions “in the government.” Police took him back to headquarters and called his sister, who said her brother tends to act this way when under “extreme pressure from life” and that she’d been trying to find him help. She drove to headquarters to pick up her property, and her brother was transported to the Stony Brook Southampton psychiatric emergency room for evaluation.
There was a dead cat in the middle of Bay Street, a caller alerted police early Friday morning. An officer spotted the black-and-white cat at the Rysam Street intersection, retrieved it from the roadway, and took it to headquarters to wait for the Sag Harbor Veterinary Clinic to open. It was dropped off for a microchip scan around 9:30 a.m., which did not detect a microchip. The clinic said it would keep the dead animal for a couple of weeks to see if an owner could be located.
A Rysam Street resident was a target of “ding dong ditch” on Saturday evening. Someone wearing a black ski mask had walked onto her porch, banged on her door, and then run off, she told police. An officer reviewed the house’s Ring camera video and described the intruder as a white male, about six feet tall, wearing a black ski mask, a black hoodie with a red logo, and light gray pants. Additional voices could be heard yelling “Kick the door” as the man approached, and the man called back “She was on the couch” as he fled the property. He could not be located during a subsequent search of the area.
Springs
He wanted to report “suspicious activity” in his driveway, a Fourth Street resident told police on the morning of Dec. 2. The two front tires of his Jeep were flat when he left his house that morning, he said, and he’d borrowed an air pump from a friend to fill them. As soon as he started to drive, however, the tires deflated again, and upon inspection he saw that they’d been slashed. They were intact when he got home around 7 the night before, he said, adding that the floodlights in his driveway, where he left the Jeep overnight, had been activated between midnight and 2 a.m. Town police photographed the scene; an investigation is continuing.
