March Comes In Like a Lion, Goes Out With Police Reports

First things first – Time to recognize some NCAA tournament pool winners from Narragansett. Sure, the tournament now ends in April each year, but the majority of it still takes place in March.

• I got invited to pick in a group hosted by of Narragansett high school kids and alumni, and the winner of that group was Sean Wright. His second bracket, which had UConn winning it all, edged out a bracket by Ryan Mycroft, thanks to that national champion pick. (For what it’s worth, I came in tied for 13th in the group of 25.)
• The Patch group was won, appropriately enough, by . He also had UConn winning the national championship, which was enough to put him past former Westerly Sun reporter Victoria Goff, and . (I once again finished middle of the pack, taking sixth of 11 brackets.)

Anyway, enough of that. (And to make sure none of us get in trouble, let me clarify that there was no money or other gifts involved in either of those pools.) On to the most popular stories of the month:

11) . This was the first OMG PD column headlined by an item from Narragansett police, and it was well-received by Narragansett Patch readers.

10) . A great, personal column from . It’s clear that it resonated with a lot of people, as it acquired page views throughout the month, as a new group would find it and pass it along.

9) . A URI student is arrested for stealing a beta fish. Also, a man named Ford ironically gets cited for driving with a suspended license.

8) . Police arrest a URI student for reckless driving, after seeing him almost hit some pedestrians, and a persistent shoplifter is arrested.

7) . The aforementioned Evan Crawley did a nice job with this piece, conducting multiple interviews with various members of the family and even calling a college coach for comment.

6) . I think the curiosity factor was high with this article.

5) . In a syndicated article from our South Kingstown site, the headline is pretty self-explanatory.

4) . In these police reports, a drunken driver can’t spell his name correctly for police, and a Connecticut man breaks into a house and punches a hole in a wall.

3) . In this police log, police dealt with a URI student twice in one night, and then his roommate the next night. (Sneak preview: This won’t be the last time you see his name in police reports. Stay tuned later this month.)

2) . Thanks to some good reporting work by South Kingstown Local Editor Carl Critz, we were one of the first outlets with information about this unfortunate happening. A follow-up story is .

1) . Our most popular story of the month kind of got there via fluke. I had the weekend off, so North Kingstown Local Editor Samantha Turner was covering my site. This was shortly after the earthquake hit, and she posted this story to all of the Patch sites in Rhode Island. For some reason though, Narragansett Patch’s version showed up as the first result in Google for a couple hours if you typed in “how to help Japan.” So, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

That’s all for now, folks. Join us next month for the next installment, when identity thieves rear their ugly head(s)…

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