Tijuana jail at 17
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Tijuana jail at 17
This is a story that I am not very proud of but it is what it is – a lot of us made some really stoooopid decisions when we were young and I certainly made my share.
The summer before my senior year in high school I was working in construction with a friend for his dad who was a building contractor, making some pretty decent cash under the table for that age. The summer was just about over and my parents went to Ventura for a weekend, leaving me home alone. So my friend and I come up with this crazy plan to drive down into Mexico and have some fun, planning to drive back on Sunday before my parents got back on late Sunday night. So we head down on Saturday to Tijuana, got a room with 2 double beds at the Nelson hotel on Revolution and headed out, walking the length of Revolution and checked into a couple of bars, had some beers and flirted with some girls. Even though we were young we were smart enough to know that these girls were just hustling us for our money so we left to find some real action. So we drove around a bit and discovered Coahuila Street.
So we parked my car and spent that Saturday night going from girl to girl to girl and everything was going great until the last girl apparently tried to take some money from my friend’s pants when he was washing up. I could hear him yell, she screamed, some guys ran down the hallway past our door and I could hear a fight break out. I ran out and down to the room where my friend was, and started throwing blows to get these two dudes off my buddy. The next thing you know 3 cops show up and we were put in handcuffs. We were taken down to the jail that was at 10th street I think and thrown into a large cell full of drunks, bums and few really scary looking dudes.
My buddy was still pissed because the the cops let the girl keep his money and I was trying to calm him down to keep from drawing more attention to us. Several hours later, people are coming and going out of the cell but we were just left there. Finally, an older cop pulls us out of the cell, down a floor into an office and tells us to wait. After about 30 or 40 minutes he comes back in with a lady and starts asking us questions about what happened and the lady is typing everything we say. He then tells us that the girl that ripped my buddy off accused him of trying to steal from her and both of the bouncers were going to file a complaint against us for assaulting them as well as destruction of property at the 5 dollar an hour hotel, warning us that we could be sent to prison for a minimum of a couple of years.
We both started freaking out but the cop stayed tight lipped. He and the lady left us there for a couple more hours, basically sh***ing our pants, wondering how in the hell we would ever get out of the situation and how much trouble we both would get into when our parents found out.
The cop finally comes back in and tells us we are going to be transferred and we are going nuts, thinking we are being sent to prison. We follow him down another set of stairs and he takes us down another hallway where he opens the door out to the street where a squad car was sitting. We’re both thinking that we were going to get in that car but then the lady who typed our statements comes out and hands us a bag with our possessions that they took from us when we arrived at the jail. The chief turned to go back inside but at the door he turned back and told us to go back to the hotel, get our things and go straight back home.
At that point we were both just standing there, wondering WTF was going on and that’s when the lady tells us he’s the police chief. He then tells us that next time would be different and that he didn’t want to see us ever again at his jail. Believe me when I say we got the message and it took all of about 10 minutes to get our bags from the hotel room and be back in line heading north at the border. I beat my parents home by about a half hour and I never told them what happened. Days later when my buddy and I talked about it, we both realized how lucky we had been and it took almost 10 years before I could get up the nerve to cross the border south again.
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