Lang
10/1/19
A regular panhandler at the intersection of Highway 6 and Riverside Drive has been arrested again after allegedly stumbling into traffic.
At 1:45pm last Thursday Iowa City Police were called to Village Inn on Sturgis Corner Drive for an intoxicated subject who kept coming into the restaurant, ordering food, then returning to the median on Riverside Drive to panhandle. An arriving officer found 51-year-old transient Scott Colebank holding a sign that said “God bless” while sitting on a bucket on the 24-inch median. The officer observed Colebank stagger to a vehicle to accept a monetary handout. When he attempted to again sit on the bucket, Colebank almost fell over.
The officer confronted Colebank, who showed multiple signs of intoxication while claiming he wasn’t drunk. When offered a breath test, Colebank told the officer to “f— off”, arguing that it didn’t matter because he wasn’t driving.
Colebank was arrested and charged with Public Intoxication.
Colebank was arrested at the same intersection last June for fighting with another panhandler over who got to beg at that spot. A few days earlier he’d been arrested at Mercy Hospital for threatening to fight officers and going into detail on how he was going to shoot the arresting officer in the head and cut him into pieces so his body wouldn’t be found. He was also arrested for violent outbursts in recent months at the Riverside Drive McDonald’s and the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.