Birmingham Blues

I guess this guy wanted to be tongue-tied:

A Citronelle man cut out part of his tongue with a razor blade hoping to distract detectives investigating the slaying of one of his employees, Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said late Friday in announcing the man’s arrest.

“It’s is a very bizarre type of case involving self-mutilation,” Cochran said.

Michael Crocker, 42, was charged Friday with the theft of more than $200,000 from Vulcan Industrial Services near Mount Vernon and with falsely reporting that assailants had attacked him and slashed his tongue, Cochran said.

Have you stopped cringing yet? I haven’t.

A part owner of the waste burning facility, Crocker is also a suspect in the August shooting death of Stephen Perret, the plant’s manager, Cochran said.

Perret, 31, was shot in the head Aug. 17, and found inside Crocker’s truck near their homes on Dogwood Lane in Citronelle. Six days later, Crocker told deputies that someone attacked him at his house…

…Before moving to Citronelle, Crocker had worked at Marine Shale Processors, a waste processing company that is at the center of one of Louisiana’s most high-profile environmental pollution cases. Crocker had testified as a federal witness and was not blamed for any of Marine Shale’s pollution.

Perret was also from Louisiana but did not meet Crocker until moving to Dogwood Lane. The two became close friends, and Crocker convinced Perret to leave a job to work at Vulcan, Perret’s father told the Press-Register in September.

“If anything happens to me, make sure you check the people I work with,” the man’s uncle, Eddie Perret, of Louisiana, remembered his nephew saying this summer.

Crocker had attended Perret’s funeral in Louisiana, according to Perret’s family. The day after the funeral, Crocker reported that his tongue had been cut.

The Sheriff’s Department investigated and discovered that the forensic evidence did not support Crocker’s attack story. He was arrested Friday at his second home in Meridian, where authorities found him packed and ready to leave the country.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under What Were They Thinking?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.