Children will make up elaborate stories to get out of trouble. The broken cookie jar is because of a monster. Or an imaginary friend. Or the dog. Yeah, that’s it. The dog did it.

The child will tell that story with innocent eyes as big as the missing cookies.

It’s what we expect from children. It’s developmentally appropriate and sometimes even a little cute — albeit frustrating.

It is not cute or appropriate from the government.

On Aug. 20, Westmoreland County officials said a review of the security at the jail would be done following an Aug. 12 incident in which inmate John Michael Crowe, 37, of Sewickley Township stuffed paper into the locking mechanism of his cell door to keep it from closing properly.

“He tampered with the door lock. The control panel showed it was locked,” Warden Steve Pelesky said.

It turns out that’s not what happened at all.

“There was no paper. It was officers error, and they failed to check the door. The door was never fully secured,” Pelesky said Monday.

That’s the day the prison board fired three guards. Board chairman and county Commissioner Doug Chew said the county wouldn’t comment due to personnel issues.

Fine. Let’s talk about the issue of a story that was represented as fact last week. Pelesky did not just tell the story of a lock jammed with paper and a control panel that showed it was secured. He went further by asserting even more was done by his guards.

“We’re all making sure, we’re double and triple checking, that doors are locked,” Pelesky said.

Except they weren’t. And they represented an incident that did not occur as being the facts in a case where Crowe has been further charged. Crowe is serving a sentence of six to 23 months for resisting arrest and public drunkenness and has more cases pending, including terroristic threats, simple assault, strangulation and harassment.

He now is charged with aggravated assault, simple assault and escape after county detectives say he left his cell and scuffled with a guard.

How will that case fare in court when the prison’s story about what happened involves an incident that didn’t occur?

The problem isn’t that there was a mistake that was corrected. It’s that there was a narrative represented as fact. It would have been easy for the warden to say a prisoner was charged with escape after an incident with a guard and that incident was being investigated.

Instead, we got a broken cookie jar and a kid pointing a finger at the dog.

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)