Early yesterday morning, a bit after midnight, Dallas police were called to the Addison border to check out a report that a man was passed out in the parking lot of a Belt Line Road office tower. When officer Sean Moses arrived, he found that the man, 33-year-old Jonathan Watts, wasn't unconscious, just incredibly drunk. He placed Watts under arrest for public intoxication and put him back of the squad car.
It was on the way downtown that police say Watts transformed from unsteady, sloppy drunk into mean, violent drunk. At one point, he started slamming his head into the divider separating him from Moses. Then, he unleashed a 10-minute volley of profanity-laden threats.
Most of these described how Watts was going to hunt Moses down and murder his family. Then, he said he was going to visit Moses' home and cut out his tongue. It wasn't clear whether he intended to do this before or after the murders.
By the time they reached Lew Sterrett, Watts seems to have sobered up enough to realize that threatening to injure the cop who's arresting you is, in addition to being enormously stupid, a third-degree felony. All those threats he had made? Only kidding. Just a big, hilariously funny joke.
Of course, Watt continued, it would only stay a joke so long as Moses forgot about the felony retaliation charge and forced him to really hunt him down and murder his family.
Moses did his best to ignore his prisoner, but when Watts started pressing up against him, Moses pinned him against the wall while jail staff finished processing his paperwork. Watts was booked in on both the public intoxication and retaliation charge, bonding out later that morning. Formal charges have not been filed.
