Sacramento, California, America, 11 January 2012

NRI Gujarati Nitin Patel’s store witnessed a strange incident early on Tuesday morning. Patel had just bought the Maaco on the corner of Arden and Blumenfeld. He took possession of the business on Monday morning where on Tuesday morning a copper wire crook was nearly shocked to death while trying to steal wires from an auto body repair shop on Arden Way.

As Patel pulled into the business, he didn’t realize the guy walking through the parking lot with cables flung over shoulder had just stolen 17 copper wires. Patel’s landlord fixed the problem and business was up and running late in the afternoon.

Late Monday night, though, a copper crook went after Patel’s wiring again.

“The thieves decided to rob not only the cables, but also the circuit breaker. It’s done extensive damage to the panel. It’s going to take six to seven days to fix and until then we’ll be operating on a temporary generator,” Patel said.

After cutting through the chain link fence and chopping a lock, the crook this time tried to pull out the whole circuit breaker, but forgot to flip one vital switch. The resulting electrical current gave the suspect one heck of a shock.

The suspect took himself to the hospital and that’s when Sacramento police stepped in.

“A general household current feed would be about 100 amps and the minimum lethal dose of electricity is one-one-thousandth of an amp,” engineer Robert Canfield says, “In a commercial setting you could have as much as 7200 volts, three to five hundred amps, even 1000 amps depending on what kind of facility it was.”

The suspect is still in a Sacramento hospital. Detectives aren’t releasing his name or the extent of his injuries, though; sources say they are quite severe. Once released from the hospital, the suspect will likely face felony vandalism charges.

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