Pirate Steals A Couple’s Home!

We’ve all had a bad day where we just wanted to get away from it all, but a Houston area woman took this to the extreme on May 9th. Renee Waguespack, age 45, from Webster, a town close to the Houston area decided to hop aboard a 52-foot yacht in Galveston and then sail away from the berth in the 6100 block of Heard’s Lane. She headed out to office Bayou just before noon.

The yacht was a Jefferson Monticello named Loyalty, which had recently been listed for sale at just under $170,000. The current owners are living on the yacht but were away when it was stolen. When they returned to their home on the water, they found it wasn’t there and reported it stolen. “Can you imagine coming around the corner and your home is gone?” Lorraine Grubbs asked. At that time the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office and the United States Coast Guard were requested to locate the craft. A little over an hour after it was first reported missing the Galveston County Sheriff’s Deputies said that they found the vessel at a different pier 2 miles away.

After the police and the Coast Guard located the watercraft, Waguespack confessed to the crime. “She wasn’t hiding,” Hancock said. “She was not in any way trying to deny that she took it.” She couldn’t explain why she had stolen the yacht and told officers that the rightful owner of the boat had sold it to someone else. It was also unclear when she had driven the yacht across the Bayou or what prompted her to do it in the first place. Officers noted that her story was incoherent and began to search the 45-year-old woman but found nothing initially. She was booked in the Galveston County Jail where a full body cavity search turned up a substance which they believed to be methamphetamines. The officers had discovered about four grams of a contraband substance in a secretive location on her person which the police declined to elaborate what that meant. The substance was to be tested to verify if it was methamphetamines. Given that she is physically a woman we can all imagine where it was located. She was then charged with possession of a controlled substance, which is a third-degree felony, in addition to the piracy.

“We haven’t had an act of piracy in quite some time,” Galveston Police’s Lt. Xavier Hancock said Wednesday. “No one was more surprised than us.”  Police were left with more questions than answers as to why the crime occurred. “It doesn’t make sense,” Hancock said. Perhaps the suspect was just enamored with Jack Sparrow and wanting a little bit of adventure and the pirate’s life for her. Alternatively, she could just have been exceptionally high on methamphetamines and thought it was a good idea to genuinely steal a yacht that someone lived on. Either way, we are sincerely happy that the Galveston Police Department and the United States Coast Guard was capable of recovering this yacht and home for this couple. Both police agencies should be commended for their work.

Texas woman takes 52-foot yacht on joyride before arrest by Galveston police https://t.co/FCJc23IfEJ via @mySA Meth induced Texas yacht joyriding is a new, and particularly dangerous, threat to us all.

— Bob Phelps (@BP7XXX) May 13, 2022