Noel Smith must have had himself an evening. So much so that when it was time to head home and turn in, he forgot where home was.
Carol Carr was home with her teenage daughters on August 1 when the girls began screaming, saying that Smith walked into their bedroom and then walked out.
Smith allegedly walked into the back door, mistaking it for his own home.
After hearing her girls screaming, Carr came running and found the intruder inside her son’s bedroom. She said he appeared to be getting ready for bed.
“I kept telling him, ‘Don’t take your clothes off, don’t take your clothes off,’ and he was starting to take his pants off,” Carr said. “I said, ‘Don’t do that,’ and he said, ‘This is my house,’ and he starts going through the laundry, trying to find something to change into.”
Carr says he put on one of her son’s shirts. That’s when she tried physically confronting him.
“I tried to get him out of the house and he said, ‘This is my house.’ I said, ‘Sir, my house,’” says Carr.
She says she tried pulling him out of the room and then he shoved her up against a wall. She called 911.
When police arrived, they found Smith still in the bedroom, which he was still convinced was part of his own house. With tasers drawn and ready, they told him to show his hands and turn around. He did, at which point they recognized him as Deputy Noel Smith, who had been with the department for the last 15 years. To their credit, they did the right thing and arrested him anyway without an attempted cover-up followed by mountains of bad publicity. Nice to see that’s not always how things work.
Smith, who had at some point recycled some of whatever he’d been drinking on himself, was charged with public intoxication, battery and trespassing. He was still talking about this being his house as he was taken away, asking officers to not let these people go into his bedroom while he was gone.
Speaking of gone, Smith has since resigned from the force. He says he plans to spend more time with people who live a block away from his family.
