Over the weekend, the arrest of a 19-year-old man on a handgun charge caught my eye. His name? Omar Little.



That of course is the name of the iconic stick-up man from "The Wire," a show that was based heavily on real people and events from Baltimore's crime history. Though the Omar character was said to be based on several people - Shorty Boyd, Donnie Andrews, Ferdinand Harvin, Billy Outlaw and Anthony Hollie - none of them were actually named "Omar Little."



I reached out to the show creator and former Sun reporter David Simon to see whether there was, in fact, an Omar Little who Simon or his writing partners had come across and used as the namesake for the character. Simon replied that the existence of a real life Omar Little was "coincidence, completely."



Fans of the show, however, seemed to delight in the news that there was actually someone in Baltimore with that name, allegedly committing gun crimes, no less. The Wire's Omar was a Robin Hood of the inner city, a shotgun-toting "man with a code" who President Barack Obama said was his favorite character. My tweet about his arrest was been "re-tweeted" hundreds of times and led to stories on blogs such as The Huffington Post and The Daily What, and then today on BuzzFeed and The Onion's AV Club.