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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

At least it was not a young boy he had met online ---


Tom Hackbarth, R, HD 48A, has a conceal and carry permit and walks about armed at all times. But that's not all STRIB had to report online, this link, this excerpt:

A state representative said it was a misunderstanding when he parked his car in the Planned Parenthood lot in Highland Park and was later stopped by St. Paul police because of the revolver he was carrying near his waistband.

Thomas Hackbarth, 58, was stopped in his car on Nov. 16 after a security guard saw him with a gun in the parking lot about 5 p.m., an hour after the clinic closed. Police ordered him out of his car at gunpoint and handcuffed and questioned him before taking his gun and letting him go.

He represents Elk River, Oak Grove and East Bethel and is considered a strong advocate of conservation issues and an opponent of abortion rights.

He said Tuesday that he is not familiar with the Highland Park area and didn't know he was at Planned Parenthood when he pulled into the empty lot so that he could look for a woman he had met online.

Hackbarth said he felt that she might have been seeing a man instead, so he parked his car and walked around the block looking for her car. (The security guard spotted Hackbarth's gun when he got out of his car and put on a winter coat.)

"I was not a jealous boyfriend," said Hackbarth, who is in the process of divorcing his wife of 25 years. "I was just trying to check up on her. It's totally a misunderstanding."


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(original unaltered first image, this link; second image, here)

________UPDATE_______
MPR carries the AP feed, here. It focuses on the armed abortion foe encounter at an abortion-related locale:

Hackbarth says he didn't realize he was in a parking lot belonging to a clinic that performs abortions. He says he was in the area searching for a woman he met online.

Hackbarth acknowledged to the St. Paul Pioneer Press the story sounds "really weird and odd."

Officers worried about "stalking-like behavior" so they kept Hackbarth's gun. He retrieved the gun on Tuesday.

PiPress gives voluminous reporting here, this excerpt:

"I was looking for my girlfriend," the report quotes Hackbarth as saying. "It was a stupid jealousy thing. I thought she was seeing another guy and I was going to check on her. She was suppose(d) to be at one of the shops over here, so I parked my truck and went to look for her car."

Hackbarth provided officers the name of the woman but said he had no contact information for her and could not recall the website where he met her. Officers couldn't contact the woman, citing a lack of information. The Pioneer Press also couldn't contact the woman.

In his interview with the Pioneer Press, Hackbarth explained that in one of the dating websites he uses, people communicate with each other via e-mail routed through a central website. "You don't have an actual e-mail address," he said.

"I honestly can't give you any information," he said. "When you meet somebody online — if that's where you go — you meet somebody and you go out for coffee. You don't exactly tell each other your life stories."

He said he uses "maybe three or four" different dating sites and couldn't remember which one.

He said the woman he was looking for was the only one he had ever actually met face to face through online dating. "You don't get a lot of responses when you say you're separated," he said.

Officers tested him for alcohol, but none was detected, according to a report. Police reports note officers found extra ammunition for the revolver, a map and binoculars in the front of Hackbarth's vehicle. The lawmaker said the binoculars were there — as was other hunting equipment in the back of his red Ford pickup — from a deer hunting trip the weekend before.

[italics added]

_________FURTHER UPDATE_________
Don't blame me. I strongly supported Laurie Olmon.

She got mentioned in the PiPress story wrap-up:

Hackbarth has no criminal record. Police found his name in a criminal database as an alias for Paul Joseph Hackbarth. Tom Hackbarth told police that was his brother, who was killed about six years ago in Illinois during a bank robbery.

Hackbarth, who easily won re-election over Democrat Laurie Olmon, said he doesn't believe the incident should reflect poorly on his leadership.

"Absolutely not," he said. "I understand why the police and the security guard thought what they might have thought, but it really was insignificant to me."

"Insignificant?" Some guy packs heat, binoculars, extra ammo, and drives across town to an abortion clinic locale, with some story about online dating services where he cannot identify an individual sufficient for police to attain a statement? No reflection on "leadership?"

Is that the judgment you want in the legislature? That quality of thought and action?

Again, don't blame me. I strongly supported Laurie Olmon. She's nice, hard-working, smart, and normal.

_______FURTHER UPDATE________
Given how Hackbarth could not, or did not give sufficient info about the "woman" for police to get a statement, we can only trust his word and hope it was not some underage teen involved, of whatever gender. And that story about the hunting - no reporting mentioned whether police even checked with DNR whether there was a hunting license obtained by Hackbarth this season, or whether he produced one before the cops dropped the case. Perhaps it's a fit question for press follow-up. DNR hunting licenses are public data; discoverable as a matter of law.