A 7-year-old boy's story of being on his bike Monday evening when he fended off a man trying to grab him by yelling “Stranger danger! Stranger danger!” was a hoax, according to Orange Police.
The boy's claim of an abduction attempt around 6:10 p.m. Monday in the 800 block of North Batavia Street produced an exhaustive investigation and less than two hours of sleep for Sgt. Fred Lopez, the Orange Police spokesman reportedly said.
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The boy had described the creeper as a man in his 30s who actually exists and was confronted by cops at a nearby business. But it wasn't the man who was at fault in the encounter with the boy, according to Lopez.
“The kid rode his bike into the man's business in a nearby warehouse. The guy got upset and yelled at the boy for crashing into the business,” Lopez told City News Service this afternoon. “He never touched the boy, but he did tell the boy he was going to find his parents and tell them what the boy had done.”
The boy begged the man not to tell his parents, “stormed out” and then obviously came up with his false claims as a cover, reports Lopez.
Guess we can't say someone needs a spanking–'cause who knows what kinda story that would produce from the kid–but can we at least take away one of his sports participation medals?
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.