Man, we’ve all been there. Someone posts a bad photograph of you on Facebook, and they flat-out won’t take it down. Such was the plight of 45-year-old Ohio man Donald Pugh, who goes by the real nickname Chip and is also a fugitive of the law. Pugh ducked out of a court appearance for a drunk-driving charge, so cops with the Lima Police Department put out a warrant for his arrest. Police posted two of Pugh’s mug shots on Facebook, asking the public for help in tracking him down.
Pugh, who got wind that his bad angles/drunk face were being shared on the internet, sent the cops an additional selfie with the message “Here is a better photo that one is terrible.” The cops obliged and added the photo to the mug-shot montage, writing, “We thank him for being helpful but now we would appreciate it if he would come speak to us at the LPD about his charges.”
Pugh doesn’t really seem to be feeling that — he’s also a person of interest in arson and vandalism cases — but he does seem to be enjoying his newfound fame. He gave an interview with a local radio station, where he explained the origin story of his mug shot. “Man, I think they just did me wrong,” Pugh says. “They put a picture out and had me looking like I was a Thundercat or something.”
“It was really me,” Pugh went on. “When I got arrested, I’d never been arrested on a misdemeanor. I went in there, and I was happy I was smiling when the officers booked me in. They were like, ‘Why you smiling?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I’m going to walk out of jail in a minute. I’m so happy.’ So I refused to take a mean mug shot.”
“I felt like a kid in the candy store because I knew I was walking out there in a couple of minutes.”
When the radio hosts asked him where he was, he suggested at one point that he was “in a bunker sitting next to Chapo Guzman, we’re trying to build a tunnel to get to McDonald’s.”
Pugh said his inspiration for law-breaking comes from nursery rhymes: “When I was a little kid, my grandmother told me a bedtime story,” he said. “My hero was this character, who used to say, ‘Run, run, fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.’”
But maybe we can’t blame you, Chip. Everyone does look way hotter in sunglasses.
