He wasn’t peeping. Really.
Unlike the 11th century Peeping Tom, the man who watched Lady Godiva ride naked on a horse around the streets of Coventry, 26-year-old David Jose Garcia was not struck blind. Instead, Garcia was charged by Utah County prosecutors with burglary and voyeurism. They said he crawled up a laundry chute connecting his bottom-floor apartment to the upstairs so he could gawk at his female neighbor. That’s when he got caught.
The woman who occupied the upper level had just finished shaving her legs, she said in court, when she opened the linen closet where the laundry chute opening was. There she saw Garcia’s head. “His eyes got big and he looked at me and went down,” she said.
If ever there was a perfect opportunity to kick somebody in the face without karate training, this was it. That would have been quite satisfying, I should think, but the woman was civil and only called the police. (I would have advised her to kick him in the face and then call the police.)
Anyway, on Monday, prosecutors dropped the voyeurism charge and settled for a guilty plea to criminal trespassing, a Class A misdemeanor for which Garcia could face $2,500 in fines and a year in the clink. He claims he was moving out of his apartment and was just checking the laundry chute to find any belongings of his that might be there.
This makes sense. Everybody knows that clothes in a basement apartment tend to fly upward through a laundry chute opening and into an upstairs linen closet. Checking it out is only reasonable. I only wonder how many other times in the past Garcia had lost something and needed to check the chute.