Typos can be troublesome beasts at the best of times – and even more so when one of them gets you arrested on felony charges.
That’s the unfortunate situation that confronted Philadelphia native Angus McCoubrey on a visit to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, when he unexpectedly wound up arrested on charges of tax evasion stemming from his time in the town of Brookline in 2013.
The problem? Angus had only spent six weeks in Brookline and never needed to file taxes there. However, he had been slapped with a misdemeanour charge for evading a taxi fare, after he and a friend underpaid a driver $2.
That little mix-up landed Angus in the slammer for two nights while he tried to establish that there had been a mistake.
“It’s one of those things you don’t expect can happen to you,” he told the Vineyard Gazette. “No one had the correct information about anything.”
Fortunately for Angus, the court in Brookline realised its error and dismissed the case, though his holiday was thoroughly ruined.
“About half of my vacation was taken away and the other half is honestly just going to be spent reliving this,” he said.
Let that be a lesson: nobody is immune to the dreaded typo – not even the lung arm of the lawn.
