In every issue of this fine rag the Weekly Volcano's hack team of wannabe journalists tackles some of the most laughable criminal acts that have recently happened in our area. Then - if we're doing our job - we write about those crimes in a way that makes you chuckle, or at the very least gives you something better to do than make up stories about how drunk and cool you were on St. Paddy's Day.

It's not the most important job, but someone has to do it. At the Weekly Volcano Crime Desk, along with getting jiggy with it, it's our life's work.

This week's Ragnet takes us to Tumwater, where sometimes they go all CSI on smalltime Mexican restaurant burglaries. Enjoy.

Here at the Weekly Volcano Crime Desk we've watched a lot of Court TV. Like, A LOT. It kind of comes with the job. Seventy-five percent of our collective knowledge regarding criminal activity comes from the show Forensic Files. The other 25-percent comes from a mix of early episodes of Cops, America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries (minus all that hokey space-alien shit).

In truth, like most Americans, without the TV we'd know nothing.

Despite the many hours we've put in behind the boob tube bearing witness to criminal reenactments and police dramas starring the late Jerry Orbach, rarely have we seen a story like this one out of Tumwater - which involves the early-2011 burglary of Plaza Jalisco restaurant on Capitol Boulevard, a left-behind pool of blood and the Washington State Patrol's Crime Lab.

According to published reports in The Olympian by Jeremy Pawloski, the Plaza Jalisco Mexican restaurant was burglarized Feb. 7, 2011 - with a plate glass window broken by the burglar to gain entry.

While that's fairly typical stuff, what followed is rare in the world of smalltime robberies. According to Pawloski's story, which cites court papers and Tumwater Police Detective Jen Kolb, a small pool of what appeared to be blood was found near the broken glass back in 2011 at the Plaza Jalisco crime scene - suspected to have come from whoever broke in. Initial tests confirmed it was blood and definitely not salsa.

Meanwhile, Damon Leroy Stevens had recently been arrested for a similar break-in at the Rusty Tractor Restaurant in Elma. Because of the similarities between the two criminal endeavors, Kolb asked the Washington State Patrol's Crime Lab to analyze the blood found, suspecting it just might be Stevens'.

Shockingly enough, the blood was a match.

According to Pawloski's story, again drawing from court papers, "... (T)he estimated probability of selecting an unrelated individual at random from the U.S. population with a matching profile was 1 in 9.1 trillion."

Thanks to the match, earlier this month Thurston County Superior Court Judge Gary Tabor sentenced Stevens to six and a half years in prison for the felony burglary charge - with the only good news for the convicted criminal being that his sentence will run concurrently with the one he's already serving. Stevens was already scheduled to be behind bars for five years and eight months thanks to separate convictions including an attempted burglary out of King County, and this latest conviction will add a total of 10 months to his incarceration. - Taco John, Mexican Restaurant Related Crime Correspondent