If you give Florida Man a pizza, he might throw it at his father, who he’s just learned helped birth him (an actual, legitimate thing that happened last month). Alternately, he might notice that Florida Teen is about to steal the delivery car. Or, best case, he might just end a four-hour SWAT standoff and go into police custody, all for a single slice.
This time, the Florida man in question is Evan Charles McLemore, who, according to the Pensacola News Journal, barricaded himself in a home on Tuesday morning after the police department was called over a possible assault and battery. McLemore seemed at risk of hurting himself, the PNJ reported, so the SWAT team was called to the house. Negotiators spent hours trying to convince him to come out, but it wasn’t until they offered McLemore a slice of pizza that he willingly went into police custody.
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Perhaps we shouldn’t discard pizza as an on-the-books crisis negotiation tactic: in 2007, another police standoff was ended by, yes, a well-timed pizza delivery. “When they delivered the food, they were able to take him into custody,” the prosecutor of that case told the Star-Ledger at the time.
Florida’s McLemore was apparently no stranger to the Pensacola Police Department. At the time of the standoff, he also had an existing warrant for aggravated stalking and faced allegations of harassment and abuse in the past.
That harassment allegedly involved not only invoking Nazi prison associates, but also Coldplay lyrics: specifically, the lyrics to the song “Fix You,” the 2005 sadboy banger that Chris Martin allegedly wrote for Gwyneth following her father’s death and definitely didn’t intend for harassment purposes. “In another [text message],” the PNJ reported, “he quoted a Coldplay song and wrote, ‘Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones and I will try to fix you.’”
Coldplay and pizza: not just for sad breakup binges anymore.
