Metro cops bust woman for eating animal crackers

Here's one of those things you don't hear about every day: KTRK's Marvin Zindler reports that Metro police arrested a woman for eating animal crackers aboard a Metro bus. Seriously — the citation she received said so.

It happened a while back to Li Li Chao, a 68-year-old Chinese woman who recently became a U.S. citizen. Her son, Jimmy Zhou, said two plainclothes Metro cops busted Chao for eating the cookies: "They took her off the bus," Zhou said. "They gave her a ticket. My mom just caught the next bus." Chao called Zhou, who was in Shanghai on business; he said the experience terrified her. "She couldn't sleep for two nights — very, very scared," he told Channel 13.

Once ticketed for eating on the bus, Chao faced a $163 fine. But the whole thing was way overdone, attorney Dean Blumrosen said: "If the bus marshals wanted to enforce rules on the bus, they could have told her, 'Don't eat animal cookies on the bus' or given her a warning," he said. Apparently, municipal court officials agreed: When Zindler talked to presiding Judge Berta Mejia, she said prosecutors had decided to drop the case — which means Chao will remain an animal cracker-munching menace to society, we suppose.

"During my time in law enforcement, I made a lot of dumb arrests," Zindler, who worked for the Harris County sheriff's office in the 1960s, said. "But this is the stupidest case I've come across."