Even as the rest of the world turns its hopeful attention to London for the 2012 Summer Clash of Nations, Florida is still hard at work churning out its fourth-biggest export behind oranges, key lime pies, and Mickey Mouse ears — bizarre news. In the latest installment of weird stuff happening in the Sunshine State, a woman from Port Orange named Claudia Ambroziak was charged with battery on a law enforcement officer after she was asked by that very same officer to demonstrate how, exactly, her husband tried to strangle her.


The Port Orange News-Journal reports that Officer Michael Garay, responding to domestic disturbance call, asked Ambroziak to show him how her husband had tried to strangle her, as if "strangle" were some sort of ambiguous verb. In his police report, Garay explains the circumstances that compelled him to arrest Ambroziak:

I asked Claudia to show me how Joe (Ambroziak) choked her. Claudia was able to place approximately two fingers and her thumb around the front of my neck...was able to apply pressure to the front of my neck.


Right about at this time in the narrative, you might expect a sensible law enforcement officer to relate how he then told Ambroziak something like, "Oh, you meant strangle — it makes so much more sense now," but Garay jumps right to how he removed Ambroziak's fingers from his neck and arrested her for touching an officer, which is a big no-no in ordinary circumstances. To be fair, Garay's report describes Ambroziak's demonstration as sudden, and, in a tense situation, it's probably not an awesome idea to just get up without prompting and start fake strangling a cop, but maybe this incident should teach police departments how asking patronizing questions (i.e. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" "Do you know how fast you were going?" "Did you realize that you were sleeping on the hood of my car?") never leads to a satisfactory outcome.

Port Orange police charge woman after she re-enacts domestic abuse claim on cop [Daytona Beach News-Journal]