On Friday night, while Emily Sutton was nearly sucked into a tornado and weatherman Aaron Tuttle (pictured above) was probably going to the gym, tanning and doing laundry, the Oklahoman quietly posted an article on NewsOK.com about Zeke Campfield.
From the paper's most prolific writer, Staff Reports:
A reporter for The Oklahoman was arrested Saturday night in Oklahoma City on an assault and battery complaint after a young woman said he bumped into her or brushed past her four times.
Zeke Campfield, 31, of Oklahoma City, was not assigned to cover any event for the newspaper at the time.
He denies wrongdoing. No charges have been filed.
Campfield was at the Cox Convention Center where graduation ceremonies were held for students in Moore, which was hit by a tornado May 20.
Three girls at the event also said he bumped into them multiple times, police reported.
Police officers also investigated concerns by witnesses that Campfield took inappropriate photos at the event but the officers did not find any physical evidence of that, according to a police report. Campfield insisted he mistakenly left his camera's memory card at home, according to the report.
“We are aware of the arrest and have taken initial steps to understand and address the situation internally,” said Kelly Dyer Fry, editor of The Oklahoman. “Zeke Campfield has been a valuable, trusted member of our news staff for more than a year, so we are very surprised by the allegations in the police report. We will continue to monitor the situation, but will allow the authorities and the court system to do their job before finalizing our response.”
Campfield has been arrested before — in February 2003 in Montana. Police there reported finding a woman's panties in his pants pocket after he was seen leaving a residence. He received a three-year deferred sentence for burglary, according to a 2003 newspaper report.
The Oklahoman does background checks on its employees but did not discover Campfield's 2003 burglary charge at the time he was hired. The charge apparently was expunged from his record after he completed probation.
Campfield has not been on assignment since the alleged incident and is currently on leave.
Yeah, nothing to see here. Move along. We'll just throw that item out there on a Friday night while tornadoes, flash floods and the monsters from Rampage attack Oklahoma City. Who cares that Zeke was previously arrested for stealing pink panties, or that our editors Rick Green and Robbie Trammell may have known about a past incident, this is not a news story and we're going to do everything possible to make it appear that way. Don't worry about it. Look! A Berry Tramel blog post about OU football! Go read that! It's really good and folksy!
Sorry, that was my impression of The Oklahoman management team after drinking OPUBCO Kool-Aid mixed with Jim Traber's truth serum. Because I'm kind of tired of this story at the moment, I'm going to buy their bag of B.S. and instead post some more strong boy pics of Aaron Tuttle. I'm sure Spencer, our female readers, and fans of bodywaxing will enjoy this:
In case your forgot, Aaron Tuttle, son of Atlas, was a former meteorologist for KOCO Channel 5. He quit the TV news biz and now spends his free time making car commercials and scaring the living shit out of people on Facebook. And no, not by posting pics like the ones above. He does it by writing things like this:
I don't often get worked up over events. There are times when all of the parameters are there and very little happens, generally because the models underestimate the CAP strength which prevents thunderstorm development. You better pray they aren't estimating this one correctly because the rest of the ingredients are all there for large damaging tornadoes between the hours of 6pm and midnight across C OK. This includes the greater OKC metro area. I hate seeing this. That said, I want each of you to take this seriously. Don't panic, have a plan, you can and will survive tornadoes as long as you take shelter. Keep your weather radios and smartphone apps ready. Remember, once tornadoes start moving into the city, cell phone networks will become overloaded so getting out phone calls and weather data will be stressed, text messages are better. If destruction happens and that is a very high possibility, then communication is severed. It is hard to remove emotion when I see the environment set up like this knowing that another Moore-like event is about to unfold. Now that I have your attention here is the forecast below.
...you better pray that the models are wrong.
That post was shared on nearly 15,000 Facebook Walls. And we wonder why people fled the storm.
Anyway, I would harp on about Aaron Tuttle and the irresponsible fear mongering in the local weatherplex, but I'm getting sick of writing about TV meteorologists, too. If I hear one more person complain about Mike Morgan, I'm also going to flee to the south.
Instead of writing about those things, let's just watch a video of a lion thinking about eating a dog in Oklahoma:
There, that's better.
