They headed out planning to catch some rare Pokémon, but ended up snaring an attempted murder suspect instead.
The Los Angeles Times reported that former Marines Seth Ortega, 24, and Javier Soch, 26, were playing Pokémon Go in Fullerton (CA), on Tuesday morning when they saw a man behaving bizarrely around children.
The two veterans were wandering the city’s downtown playing the augmented reality game when Soch’s app froze.
When he looked up, he saw a man appearing to scare a mother and her three sons,
The pair, who are roommates, said the man, identified as 39-year-old Jacob Kells, looked odd and was dressed in a large jacket and baseball cap, and was holding a fake rose.
The man then approached another woman who was with her two sons.
Soch said he saw the man touch one of the boy’s upper body as he talked to the mother.
Police were called and arrested the man and also took statements from the ex-Marines.
Ortega said the confrontation was not violent and that the man waited on the sidewalk as he cooperated with the cops.
Kells was arrested on suspicion of child annoyance, but after running his details through police systems, it emerged that officers had a warrant for the man’s arrest for attempted murder from Sonoma County, California.
In addition to attempted murder, police said, Kells was wanted for assault with a deadly weapon, assaulting and resisting a peace officer, possession of a stolen vehicle and felony evading causing great bodily injury.