Lethal Dose

BELLEVILLE, Ill. - James Dowdy has admitted his hankering for women’s hosiery has been his undoing, earning him three stints in prison and repeated scoldings from judges over the years. So police say it’s no surprise the 36-year-old man is knee deep in trouble again because of his lust for leggings.

St. Clair County prosecutors charged Dowdy on Friday with felony attempted burglary for his uninvited visit to a parked car and with misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge for dropping stolen socks “in an unreasonable manner, as to alarm and disturb.”

“He’s obviously got some problems,” Belleville police Capt. Don Sax (Sax!) said Monday of Dowdy, who remains jailed on $50,000 bond. “We can’t crawl into his head and come up with a particular answer to why he does this. We have to assume it’s part of his sexual deviation.”

Authorities have no evidence that Dowdy has ever threatened anyone.

“To the best of our knowledge, he’s just after the socks,” Sax said. “Generally, they are almost always female socks.”

In the weeks leading to his latest arrest, Sax said, witnesses in Dowdy’s neighborhood reported seeing a suspicious person slinking about, at times peeking through windows. Often, Sax says, socks were left behind, though it’s unclear whether the culprit dropped them clumsily or as a calling card.

Police responding to one of the reports saw Dowdy — who fit the description of the man reported by neighbors — trying to crawl into his house through a basement window, socks in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Witnesses picked Dowdy from a photo lineup, Sax said, but he wasn’t arrested at the time.

Can you imagine the conversation? “Officer Sox, I mean, Sax, a dowdy man wants my sox for sex!”

I’ve said it before, I’ve blogged it before, and I’ll say it again: you have more to fear from trains than a car or plane! From my friend Eve, who first alerted me to the startling statistic of train related fatalities:

NYT–Two men were struck and injured by trains late Saturday and early yesterday, one by a subway in Brooklyn and one by a commuter train in Queens, the police said. The first man, 26, was found on the L train tracks near the Grand Street station in East Williamsburg shortly before 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, the police said. He had been struck by a train and critically injured and was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center. It was unclear how he had come to be on the tracks, but criminal activity was not suspected, the police said. The second man, identified as Eduardo Zenteno, 19, of Brooklyn, was on the Long Island Rail Road tracks between the Woodside and Shea Stadium stations when a westbound train struck him about 4:30 a.m. yesterday, according to Susan McGowan, a spokeswoman for the railroad. He was in serious but stable condition at Elmhurst Hospital Center yesterday, she said.