INSIDE

In odd coincidence, man runs into
another brain-dead creature 50 years later

By Meg Olson

When Jim Keith was a nineteen-year-old sailor in the Canadian Navy, he got a little rambunctious on shore leave in Hawaii. He wound up paying $25 to get out of jail with a dead bird on his conscience and a headache. Almost half a century later the headache was back when the old fiasco resurfaced and Keith was told at the Point Roberts port of entry, where he had been crossing the border a few times a week since he was a child, that he was no longer welcome.

“I’ve had a boat in this marina since it was built,” said Keith, a Delta resident who in 1939 lived on South Beach Road in Point Roberts. “I’ve been crossing the border all the time since 1955.”

What happened in 1955 was that Keith pleaded guilty to second degree larceny in a Hawaiian court and was given $25 bail forfeiture as a punishment. “I probably had a few too many drinks and in a bar in downtown Hilo the bartender decided it was time for me to get out,” Keith said. As bouncers prepared to toss Keith down the establishment’s entrance stairs, he grabbed onto a cage above his head. “Me, the cage and the parrot went down,” Keith said. “There we were and away I went.”

Keith and the parrot hid in a swamp until he couldn’t stand it anymore and he and the bird were pinched as they came out. He spent the night in jail and woke up in morning to learn the bird had perished, “either of fright or a heart attack,” and he was due before the judge for stealing the unfortunate animal.

Almost 50 years later, Keith was told he could not renew his CANPASS permit for his boat. “They said they had to cancel it based on information received from the U.S.,” he said. Keith went to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service inspectors at the Point Roberts port of entry to see what they had. “He punched it into the computer and there was nothing.”

Keith asked that the inspector keep looking and eventually the Hawaiian bird heist was discovered. “I asked him what I should do and he said he didn’t know what I was going to do but he wasn’t going to let me in,” Keith said. Keith contacted Bellingham attorney Russell Pritchett who helped him put together documents to convince local inspectors Keith was not inadmissible because of the 50-year old charge.

He wrote on August 20, citing the section of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act that allows exceptions for people convicted of petty offenses. The law states applicants who have been found guilty of a “crime of moral turpitude,” which covers all theft, are inadmissible.

However, they are allowed if they were only convicted of one offense and “the maximum penalty possible ...did not exceed imprisonment for one year and if the alien was not sentenced to imprisonment in excess of 6 months.” Keith initially met with little satisfaction when he went back to the border with his pile of notarized documents.

“He just leafed through them, told me he turned a lot of people back and said it was nothing, I was wasting my time,” Keith said. However, acting port director Tom Merlina agreed to review the case and on August 29 Keith was back on his boat in the marina. “He told me I just made it,” Keith said. “That’s OK, I’m just glad to be here.”

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