When you send your children to school, you might
think that the fat substitute teacher in the t-shirt and sandals is harmless.
So you might be surprised to know that PutnumLive.com publisher and part-time substitute teacher Mark Vance Halburn was once arrested for strong-arm robbery (211 PC), a felony, in California.
Arrested in in 1989, he spent over a week in the San Bernardino County Jail before he was released for trial.
Halburn purchased a set of shelves that was allegedly missing a shelf. He went to the furniture factory while on his lunch break from his substitute teaching job and after allegedly making some threats, and forcing a worker to take a shelf out of another shelving unit, left with a new shelf. He was later arrested at home after the employee alleged that he had a gun.
Robbery is defined as taking of property from another against their will by means of force or fear. The force doesn't need to be anything other than simple physical force or threat of force along with the intent to coerce and prevent resistance. There don't even have to be any weapons involved.
Strong-arm robbery is exactly what the name implies, a robbery committed through physical force or intimidation, or both. A robbery where the victim is punched or shoved, the classic mugging, is a strong-arm robbery under California law.
Many strong arm robberies are committed by people who are large and imposing in size. There is no actual weapon used. However they use their large size to bully a victim into handing over his valuables.
Starting to sound familiar now?
It's the classic Hallburn M.O.
Go to a furniture factory, get up in a clerk's face, make a lot of vague threats and bully them into coughing up a shelf.
Later at trial, the charges were reduced to disturbing the peace, to which Hallburn pled no contest and was placed on one year's probation.
Ironically, after he was released, Halburn never got the shelf back.
