Law Pounces on Sleeping Suspect

When police here ran a routine warrant check on a man sleeping in his car early Thursday, they realized they had no choice but to put 36-year-old Scott Sylvester Craig behind bars.

The Placentia man was wanted on a $7,500 bench warrant for illegally possessing reptiles, a chipmunk and a toad.

In fact, Craig was once dubbed “one of the largest abusers of wildlife for profit we know of” by a state Department of Fish and Game warden.

A resident called police about 3:50 a.m. to report a suspicious-looking car parked at Brookhurst Street and Hamilton Avenue. Inside the 1991 Yugo, a car made for a brief time in the former Yugoslavia, was a sleeping Craig. When police checked his driver’s license, they discovered the warrant issued in September in Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel.

Craig was cited in May, 1991, for having a living room full of snakes and other live reptiles taken from the California desert, including a Gila monster, an iguana, two chuckwallas and an alligator lizard. Also seized from his living room that day were a chipmunk and a toad.

A warden who investigated the case said at the time that Craig was selling the Gila monsters for about $1,200 apiece by placing ads in local newspapers.

Craig, who was then living in Mission Viejo, was sentenced to three years’ probation in 1992 and ordered to pay more than $2,800 for illegally possessing the 24 animals.

The circumstances of the bench warrant were unknown Thursday. It was issued by Municipal Judge Ronald P. Kreber, the same judge who sentenced Craig three years ago.

Fish and Game officials were not immediately familiar with Craig’s case, but spokesman Pat Moore said Thursday that it is “illegal to maintain possession of wildlife without a permit, and that’s what he’s done, obviously. You can’t hold onto wildlife.”

Craig was booked into Orange County Jail, Huntington Beach Lt. Dan Johnson said. Police did not know why he was sleeping in his car.

“Most people know that these things are illegal,” added another Fish and Game spokeswoman. “When they are contacted by a Fish and Game officer, they’re going to be cited. Once they’ve imprinted the animal, it can’t survive in the wild anymore. In the state of California you cannot have wild animals as pets.”