Issac Bennett (photos courtesy Tishomingo County Sheriff’s Office)
Jonathan Hamm
Las Vegas is famous as a town of second chances, a place where someone can get a fresh start. It’s almost part of the culture and a reason, I suspect, why a lot of people gravitate here.
Well, that and maybe they also like to gamble.
With these possible motivations, Jonathan Hamm and Issac Bennett showed up last week in Sin City. They most recently were residents of Iuka, Miss., in the state’s hard-scrabble northeastern corner not far from Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo.
However, Hamm and Bennett carried some baggage. They were riding in a locally stolen car Bennett was driving when Las Vegas Metro police pulled them over late one night. Nor, as it turned out, was that the pair’s first stolen vehicle of the month. They had escaped together a week earlier from the Tishomingo County Jail in Iuka (pronounced eye-YOU-ka) and had swiped a vehicle to hot-foot it out of town. This buddy act was still on the lam.
Hamm, 26, and Bennett, 23, were arrested and put in a Clark County jail pending their eventual return to Mississippi. They will face escape, vehicle theft and damage-to-public-property charges on top of whatever they were in jail for in the first place.
Accordingly, I’m nominating Hamm and Bennett for my list, It Didn’t Stay Here. It’s a roster of of folks in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Vegas. This is a twist on the famous marketing slogan of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” You can find the entire list elsewhere on this page.
In this case, the Vegas happening is the continuing escape that ended here and will be prosecuted in Mississippi. It’s not clear if Bennett (whose first name is spelled variously in different official records as Issac or Isaac) as the driver will first face Nevada charges for stealing the car in which they were riding. Continue reading →
