However, he also brought along something a little larger than a stirring straw. Espresso Roma staffers initially thought it was a samurai sword, but it proved to be something even more exotic: a double-bladed knife with an evidence tag from the Denver Police Department still attached.
Which made it difficult to toss him out of the joint.
Boulder Police Department spokeswoman Sarah Huntley has the details:
"We were called to the coffee shop at a little before 11:20 a.m. on Friday," she says. "The general manager called to say a customer had been sitting on the patio since about nine o'clock making inappropriate comments to female customers. He'd been asked to leave three times, and he was refusing to leave -- and he had what appeared to be a samurai sword lying on the table.
"But it wasn't actually a samurai sword. It was two separate knives, with blades about eleven-and-a-half inches long that were joined together, with each blade stuck into the handle of the other. And it had an evidence tag attached to its handle indicating it had been seized previously by Denver Police for 'flourishing' -- brandishing it. And the name on the tag was the name of the suspect."
By the time the cops showed up, Alexander had split, leaving his laptop, Tarot cards and bizarre weapon on the table where he'd been sitting. However, he was pretty easy to track thanks to his outfit; Huntley notes that he was clad in "a green shirt with an expletive on it." Within half an hour or so, cops had spotted him in the area and brought him back to the coffee shop, where, she says, "he acknowledged that that the property on the table belonged to him."
Alexander was subsequently transported to Boulder County Jail on a charge of unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon. Huntley points out that he doesn't have a concealed-carry permit.
Not that his two-bladed mini-scythe would have been that easy to conceal without risking the sort of injury that made John Bobbit famous. That would have been too close a shave...
