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Plenty of drunk SEC fans have done crazy things over the years. They don’t call the Georgia-Florida game “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” for no reason.
But crazy, drunken fan behavior isn’t limited to the SEC.
Early Saturday morning in Waco, Texas, an Oklahoma fan who’d had way too much to drink left a bar, walked back to his hotel and went to sleep. At least he thought it was his hotel.
It wasn’t.
The building he thought was the Waco Hilton was actually the city’s courthouse. And the room he thought was his hotel room was actually a courtroom. And the place he was sleeping wasn’t a bed; it was a bench.
When police arrived at the courthouse in response to a burglar alarm that had been tripped, they found 35-year-old Harold Schroeder sound asleep on a bench in the front row of one of the courtrooms.
Quickly realizing that Schroeder was drunk, they woke him up, helped him out of the courthouse and kindly took him to a room with an actual bed. It also wasn’t his room at the Hilton – it was a jail cell.
Schroeder spent the rest of the morning sleeping off his drunkenness in a cell.
Schroeder was arrested on a Class B misdemeanor criminal trespass charge. He posted $1,000 bond and was released at 2:15 p.m., almost five hours before the Sooners’ game with Baylor.
Luckily for the drunk fan, he won’t have to return to the courthouse. McLennan County Sheriff’s Capt. Steve Smith said Schroeder was not charged with burglary of a building because police determined he had no intention of actually stealing anything. The Sheriff’s Department realized he was just a drunk guy looking for a place to sleep.
Not surprisingly, Schroeder told police he had no clue how he ended up in a third-floor courtroom. No one else knew either, since the doors to the courthouse were supposed to be locked.
He probably also couldn’t explain how he was able to climb the 40 limestone steps to the front entrance of the courthouse, or how he confused the courthouse with the Hilton, since the buildings look absolutely nothing alike.
Later that night, then-No. 12 Oklahoma upset then-No. 6 Baylor, 44-34. Hopefully Schroeder was sober enough to enjoy his team’s win.
