Bathurst — In the northern New Brunswick city of Bathurst, home to around 13,000 people, one resident was deemed “suspicious” for holding and reading what appeared to be a book, containing words, with no pictures or anything.
Police stopped the literate man, who is black, on his way home from Stonehaven Wharf on Thursday evening. He was informed by RCMP that he was pulled over because of several calls reporting a “suspicious” reading man who wasn’t playing with his phone or smoking or talking to a buddy, but reading from an honest-to-god book.
Longtime Bathurst barber Francis Ouellette was the first to notify the police of the dubious bookworm. “I saw him down there and said to myself, ‘What the heck… this guy think he’s a scholar or something? Where’d he get that book, anyway?’ I called up the cops and they promised me they’d at least question the guy — he had to be plotting something. You don’t just read a chapter book because you want to; not in my experience, anyways.”