A one-legged sailor beat Hurricane Milton by hunkering down in his boat – but he has lost to law enforcement.
Lieutenant Dan, lesser known as Joseph Malinowski, was arrested by the Tampa Police Department on Friday morning for refusing to move his vessel.
Cops had told Malinowski on Thursday that he was not properly disposing of waste on his boat and did not have a marine sanitation device.
They demanded that he move his sailboat away from the Bayshore Linear Park in Florida and gave him ‘numerous warnings’. But it was still there on Friday and he was taken into custody around 7.30am, WTSP reported.
He was listed in his arrest notice as unemployed, but his occupation was ‘TIK TOK STAR’.
Malinowski was nicknamed after the Forrest Gump film character who survived a hurricane inside a boat. Also similar to the fictitious character who lost both his legs in the Vietnam War, Malinowski lost a leg in a car accident when he was 16 years old.
He had gone viral on TikTok for saying as the Category 3 storm approached last week: ‘I’m gonna be fine. This is a boat. It’s meant to be on water.
‘I have no concerns, God’s got me. I’m gonna hunker down and do my TikTok.’
Malinowski said he slept through Milton, while about five million people were under evacuation orders and the majority fled the Tampa Bay area.
He was seen sticking his head out of the window of his boat around 11pm on the day Milton made landfall and telling a journalist he was ‘fine’.
Malinowski had maintained that he would only leave if his boat began breaking.
Cops have now taken Malinowski to Orient Road Jail and his boat, which was not registered, has been impounded.
He had two outstanding warrants for failure to appear in court as well as a misdemeanor charge for trespassing in a city park despite a warning.
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