Woman Quits Smoking by Slapping a Cop

Here's one way to quit smoking: assault police personnel, get arrested and be forced to go cold turkey in jail. This was the plan that led 31-year-old Etta Lopez to wait outside the Sacramento County Jail for hours for a law enforcement official to come out, so she could slap him. The victim of her ploy, Deputy Matt Campoy, says she came out of nowhere and purposely blocked his path. “All of a sudden, she stepped into me and slapped me in the face,” he says. As she had hoped, Lopez was immediately arrested and taken to jail. “She told us that she needed to quit smoking,” says Campoy. “She explained it with great detail as to why.” One of Lopez's neighbors says he supports her quitting the habit, but not her chosen cessation method. “There’s easier ways to stop smoking than hitting a cop,” he says. “that’s not the way I want to quit.” Kimberly Bankston-Lee of California anti-smoking group Breathe California says that the desperation behind such a plan shows just how difficult it is to quit. “If it led somebody to do something like that to quit, that lets us know in the community that we have a real problem,” says Bankston-Lee. Check out the local news report below: