Open mouth, insert boot

So one night not too long ago, I'm checking an area adjacent to one of our larger cemeteries a little after midnight when I spot a parked unoccupied car. The hood's still warm to the touch so I mark out and start looking for the owner as no one has any business being out on foot in this area this late. My guess is that they've jumped the wall into the cemetery, and sure enough, not thirty seconds later, I hear a sound and turn to see two young people in their early twenties climbing back over the wall. I'm back in some bushes so they don't see me right away. Once I'm sure that there's only two of them, I call out for them to stop. But they ignore me and keep right on walking as if I hadn't just yelled out. I call out again as I start moving after them. "Hey! Yo! You two! Police! Stop!"

And they just keep right on walking, as if I'm talking to someone else or something.

I call out a third time, and this time I also flash my light at them and this apparently gets their attention and they finally stop and turn around. Now I'm kinda peeved since I'm figuring that they must have been ignoring me as there's no way that they couldn't have heard me. And I let them know it. "Are you two fucking deaf, or what?"

A minute later, I found out that yes, they both were indeed deaf. It turned out that they were resident students at the local school for the hearing impaired. And I'm so thankful that with my light in their eyes, they could not read my lips when I asked that last brilliant question.

I'm also glad that I was running single car that night. That's the sort of flub that even the best partner can't resist sharing at roll call or at "choir practice".

Ah well...

As for the deaf kids, I ID'd them, wrote them a note advising them of the cemetery trespass policy, had them each sign it, and sent them on their way. I could have hooked them up, but once you arrest one deaf person, you learn that it's not something that you want to do again if you can avoid it.