But Blockbuster closed! A North Carolina man was arrested on Tuesday, March 22, for not returning a Tom Green VHS tape that he rented … in 2002.
The bizarre incident went down when James Meyers was pulled over for a broken brake light. The police officer ran his license, which revealed that Meyers was a wanted man.
“The officer said, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this but there’s a warrant out for your arrest from 2002,'” Meyers recalled to WSOC Channel 9 News. “‘Apparently you rented the movie Freddy Got Fingered and never returned it.’ I thought he was joking.”
Guess again. Meyers had his daughter in the car at the time, so the officer allowed him to leave the scene. Meyers later turned himself in to clear up the situation and was briefly handcuffed. He was charged with failure to return rental property and was given a court date in late April. Per the New York Daily News, the crime is punishable by a fine of up to $200 in North Carolina.
“They’re not focusing on the crimes I think they should be focusing on,” Meyers said, via WSOC. “That hour the cops sat out there with me, the hour and a half I was down in the magistrate’s office could have been spent somewhere else.”
NEW: Local man arrested for not returning ‘Freddy Got Fingered’ VHS from 2002 @tomgreenlive https://t.co/3F8Cjrs4hu pic.twitter.com/9wiNTZsto2
— WSOCTV (@wsoctv) March 24, 2016
Green, like so many others, caught wind of Meyers’ crazy dilemma. The actor joked about it via Twitter and retweeted several outlets that wrote about it. “I just saw this and I am struggling to believe it is real,” he wrote on Wednesday.
He also offered to give Meyers the money. “If it’s 200 bucks of course I’ll pay it for him,” Green, 44, told the Daily News, “just for the principle of the thing.”