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Woman shocked when her Grubhub pizza was delivered by the police instead of her driver

Tempe Police Department keeping things hot 'n' ready.

via Tempe Police Department/X

A woman shocked that the police delivered her pizza.

Have you ever been waiting for an Uber driver or a food delivery and had serious questions about where the driver was headed or why they were waiting so long at a light while you watched their progress on a map? Brandy Parrish of Arizona had some serious questions on July 4th when her Grubhub driver stopped for an incredibly long time while she was eagerly awaiting her food.

"He was making really good time then, all of the sudden, he stops, a block from away from our apartment,” Parrish told Fox 10 News. Fifteen minutes after the car stopped, Parrish noticed the car travelling the wrong direction on the Grubhub map. Unbeknownst to Parrish, her driver had been arrested by Tempe Police for reckless driving and excessive speed. It seems the driver went out of his way to deliver the pizza hot and on time.

Fortunately for Parrish, the officers decided that, even though the driver was headed to jail, the pizza still needed to be delivered. Talk about protecting and serving… hot pizza. "Stuffed crust pepperoni pizza with some crazy puffs. Very important," Parrish told Fox 10 News.

Body cam footage revealed the moment that Parrish was startled to see the police at her door holding her pizza and crazy puffs.

— (@)

"How are you doing?" an officer asked.

"Good. How are you?" she responded.

"Very good. Brandy?" the officer holding the pizza asked to verify whether she was the rightful owner of the pizza.

"Yes," she confirmed.

"So your Grubhub guy got arrested, so we still delivered your pizza," the officer said.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

The officers believed that, despite the driver's multiple traffic law violations, he still deserved to have his delivery mission accomplished, and that the pizza and crazy puffs should still be hot when they arrived. After all, as Parrish saw on the map, the driver was right by her apartment when he got arrested. "It was, two minutes from where the vehicle stop was. We came to the consensus that this person should probably get their pizza," Officer Gavin Young told Inside Edition.

"When a delivery driver was arrested during a traffic stop, our officers made sure the pizza still got to the customer," the police department wrote on Facebook. "The order was Hot-N-Ready, and the suspect was Caught-N-Steady. We’re committed to serving our community 24/7—whether it’s safety or pizza delivery!"

Unfortunately for the arrested Grubhub driver, he probably won’t be doing too many deliveries when he gets out of jail. If you get a major driving violation, such as reckless driving or driving under the influence, while driving for Grubhub, your account can be deactivated.

All in all, it’s nice that in the heat of the moment, the officers did right by the delivery driver and his customer by showing up with the pizza and crazy puffs. Now, the only thing we don’t know is whether Parrish tipped the officers or left a nice gratuity on the Grubhub app since the driver could probably use a few bucks towards his bail money.

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Education

'Something shifted' since COVID: High school teacher shares the reason why he's quitting

“Part of me feels like I’m abandoning these kids."

via RDNE Stock project/Pexels

Teens taking a selfie at school.

The kids in high school in 2024 have always lived in a world where smartphones exist. Many were raised on iPads and given smartphones by the time they started middle school. During this time, research has begun to reveal the dangerous effects smartphones have on young people; now, teachers and students are forced to cope with the harmful effects of this social experiment.

A recent Speak Up survey found that 80% of teachers think phones distract students and 70% of administrators say it is difficult for students to manage their smartphones responsibly.

Mitchell Rutherford, 35, a high school biology teacher at Sahuaro High School in Tucson, Arizona, is quitting his job of 11 years because his students’ addiction to their phones is making it nearly impossible for him to teach. Rutherford told The Wall Street Journal that something “shifted” in high school kids after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There was this low-energy apathy and isolation,' he told the Wall Street Journal. At first, he thought it was his teaching, but he realized it was the phones. "This year something shifted, and it's just like they are numbing themselves, they are just checking out of society, they're just like can't get rid of it, they can't put it away,” he told KVOA.

Tucson biology teacher quits over students not being able to put down their phones

“Now, you can ask them, bug them, beg them, remind them and try to punish them and still nothing works,” Rutherford told the Wall Street Journal.

Students aren’t allowed to use phones in classes at Sahuaro, but that doesn’t stop them. So, it’s up to the teachers to enforce what feels unenforceable. He says that when he tries to take a phone away from a student they hold onto them for dear life. “That's what an alcoholic would do if you tried to take away their bottle,” he told them.

He likens his students' relationships with their phones to a severe addiction.

"Opioids, obviously a huge problem, cocaine heroin, all of those drugs, alcohol, it's all a big problem, but like sugar even greater than that and then phones even greater than that,” he told KVOA.

Mitchell Rutherford has taught high-school biology for 11 years. A millennial and digital native, he used to think technology had a place in the classroom and students could be taught to manage their phone use.

This year showed him the grim truth. 🔗https://t.co/dbXe4IoR0R pic.twitter.com/mSBkrRrUHS
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 22, 2024

He even attempted to give his students extra credit if they reduced their screen time. "Here's extra credit, let's check your screen time, let's create habits, let's do a unit on sleep and why sleep is important, and how to reduce your phone usage for a bedtime routine, and we talked about it every day and created a basket called phone jail,” he said.

But in the end, it was a losing battle for Rutherford and the phones have won.

In February, he told the school that he was leaving the teaching profession to preserve his well-being. "I have been struggling with mental health this year mostly because of what I identified as basically phone addiction with the students."

When asked how parents and school administrators can help fix this problem, his solution is simple: get kids off their phones. “As a society, we need to prioritize educating our youth and protecting our youth and allowing their brains and social skills and happiness to develop in a natural way without their phones,” he told KVOA.

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Democracy

What to know about the 1864 abortion ban Arizona's Supreme Court says is 'now enforceable'

The legal code it comes from also outlaws interracial marriage and forbids minorities from testifying against white people in court.

Peter Zillmann (HPZ)/Wikimedia Commons, Brandon Friedman/Twitter

Arizona's borders may soon be even more consequential.

When the 2022 Dobbs decision overturned the federal protection of medical privacy in reproductive decisions, leaving abortion law up to the states, experts warned of the legal and medical consequences to come: People in states with old laws on the books would find themselves facing abortion restrictions the likes of which had not been seen in over 50 years since Roe vs. Wade became "settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court," and medical providers would face legal conundrums that threatened patient care.

Nearly two years later, we've seen the fallout on multiple fronts, from women suing states for denying them medically necessary care to children who have been raped and impregnated being forced to travel across state lines to get an abortion.

And the latest development has Arizona set to enact a near-total abortion ban based on a 1864 legal code, after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that the law "it is now enforceable."

Here's what to know about the 160-year-old law:

There is only one abortion exception allowed for in the law—to save the life of the mother. As medical providers have made clear, that kind of exception is a murky gray area that leads to impossible questions like "How imminent does a mother's death need to be?" for a doctor to take action without fearing legal repercussions.

Civil War-era historian Heather Cox Richardson shared some of the details about how the law came about and the context in which it was written on Facebook, and the historical facts paint a picture of how utterly absurd it is for the law to go into effect in 2024.

"In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases," wrote Richardson. She pointed out that the U.S. was in the midst of the Civil War, and that the law didn't actually have much to do with women and reproductive care.

"The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men," she explained, sharing that the word "miscarriage" was used in the criminal code to describe various forms of harm against another person, specifying dueling with, maiming and poisoning other people.

Richardson offered that detail as the context in which the law states that "a person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years."

How did the law even come about? At that time, the newly formed Arizona Territorial Legislature was composed of 27 men. The first thing they did was authorize the governor to appoint a commissioner to draft a code of laws, but a judge named William T. Howell had already written one up. After some discussion, the legislators enacted Howell's laws, known as "The Howell Code."

The code included laws like, "No black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of or against any white person," as well as "All marriages of white persons with negroes or mulattoes are declared to be illegal and void."

Richardson also pointed out that the code set the age of consent for sexual intercourse at 10-years-old.

Arizona wasn't admitted to the union until 1912
— (@)

Essentially, a law written by one man, 48 years before Arizona was officially a state, over half a century before women were allowed to vote, when it was perfectly legal to enact and enforce racist laws and see 10-year-olds as old enough to consent to sex, is now considered "enforceable" by the Arizona Supreme Court.

As Richardson pointed out, the difference now is that women can vote. And Americans have proven time and again that draconian abortion laws are wildly unpopular across the political spectrum. Even some Republican lawmakers and politicians are flip-flopping on previous praise for the 1864 law, saying that the Arizona legislature needs to do something about the law to prevent it from taking effect.

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Democracy

Arizona election official posts perfect response to woman who received two mail-in ballots

These kinds of clear, concise explanations are the best way to battle misinformation about how votes actually get counted.

Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash

A woman received two ballots in the mail. Is that a problem?

Since having elected leaders instead of kings is a hallmark of our democratic system, Americans share a common concern for election integrity. But for some, that concern has grown into full-blown conspiracy theories and misinformation about election fraud since before Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

Despite dozens of lawsuits either being dismissed as groundless or lost on their merit in court, people still try to claim that the 2020 election was rife with fraud.

One of the primary targets of those fraud claims is mail-in ballots. People haven't seemed to wrap their minds around how mail-in ballots can be secure and how people can be prevented from voting twice if they happen to have more than one ballot mailed to them.

Turning Point USA field rep Aubrey Savela shared a photo of two official Arizona ballots with her name on them to X, with the caption, "Maricopa county at its finest… My first time ever voting in a presidential preference election and I received not one but two mail-in ballots.Thank you @stephen_richer."

Stephen Richter, the man she tagged, is a Maricopa County election official—and a Republican, incidentally, who sued Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake for defamation after she accused him of sabotaging the election. And his response to Savela's insinuation that receiving two ballots was somehow problematic was absolutely pitch perfect.

— (@)

"Hi Aubrey!

Thanks for reaching out. You changed your voter registration on the last day of voter registration (Feb. 20) from your Chandler address to your new Tempe address.

Because early ballots must go out on Feb. 21, your Chandler ballot was already set to go out, and so it did.

Then we sent out a new ballot to your Tempe address when we processed your voter registration modification.

That's why you had to redact out different lengths in the address (because they were sent to different addresses).

You'll also notice that one of packet codes ends in "01" (the one to your old address) and one ends in "02" (the one sent to your new address). As soon as the "02" one goes out, the "01" packet is dead. Meaning even if you sent it back, it wouldn't proceed to signature verification, and it wouldn't be opened. That's how we prevent people from voting twice.

So just use the one with your new address ending in "02" -- that's the only one that will work.

Hope this helps! Have a great night! Happy voting!"

Richter didn't slam her, make fun of her, call her names or shame her for trying to make it look like something fishy was afoot. He simply laid out exactly what happened to cause her to receive two ballots, explained how the first ballot was rendered invalid as soon as the second ballot was issued, and explained how the process safeguards people's vote and the integrity of the election in general.

These are the kinds of cool-headed, informative, clear and concise explanations we need for people to understand how mail-in ballots and other election apparatuses function. People make all kinds of assumptions about how those processes work without actually finding out the reality, so having a real example laid out in such a clear way is fantastic to see.

Yes, election fraud can happen, as can honest mistakes that impact people's votes. But time and time again, investigations into election fraud claims have yielded only a miniscule fraction of a percent of votes impacted by actual fraud—not enough to even come close to swinging an election one way or another.

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Joy

Arizona couple ties the knot in the same place they met, the mayonnaise aisle

"We don't have that many more years to do something dumb and stupid."

Photo by Kelsey Todd on Unsplash

Couple ties the knot in the mayonnaise aisle

Everyone does something a little outside of the norm at least a few times in their life.

Of course this isn't based in science, it's just an observation that likely keeps life interesting. A couple took a step outside of the expected when they decided to get married in the "mayonnaise aisle" at their local grocery store, Fry's Food and Drug in Casa Grande, Arizona.

The two were both strolling down the aisle looking for mayonnaise when their paths crossed and it was love at first sight. Denis and Brenda Delgado decided to exchange phone numbers and the rest quickly fell into place.

The couple met in August 2021, and a week after exchanging numbers, Denis asked Brenda out on a date. Things obviously went well because the following April, he popped through her door to announce that he was going to buy her an engagement ring. Brenda told Fox 10 Phoenix that she called him a couple of hours later and asked, "have you been drinking?"

Denis's soon to be wife had one request if he was going to propose - that he do it in the same aisle they met. I don't know about you, but I'm sensing a theme here. Love will make you do interesting things because Denis agreed and then added the cherry on top by telling her they could also get married there.

Brenda walked down the aisle lined with more than just condiments. Family and friends came out to witness the nuptials. The bride told Fox 10 Phoenix, "We don't have that many more years to do something dumb and stupid." This wedding is sure to be the talk of the town for a while. Don't just listen to me, the newlyweds tell you all about it below.

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Joy

A community in Arizona rallied together when their neighbor's pet tortoise wandered away from home

Elliot the tortoise had everyone from neighbors to DoorDash delivery drivers looking for him.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

A tortoise can walk quite far.

We've told so many stories about pets escaping from their homes, but this is one you've probably never heard before.

In June, a 150-pound African sulcata tortoise named Elliot got out of his family's yard, setting off a wild goose (tortoise?) chase within his Arizona community. Yes, you read that correctly, a pet tortoise got out and had to be found.

On the morning of June 19, Cindy Iverson went out to her yard after letting her dogs out and discovered that a storm had blown the back gate open. This set up the perfect opportunity for Elliot to escape.

"We panicked," Iverson told PEOPLE. "We looked everywhere. They're so nomadic. They just walk and walk, these tortoises. Once they get out, they can walk miles and miles."

At the time, the weather was very hot, and Iverson and her husband Gary were worried about 12-year-old Elliot's safety. Because of the heat and the tortoise's ability to walk for long distances, Elliot could end up in real danger if he wasn't found quickly. So Cindy reached out to her neighborhood email list and put out the call.

"Immediately, one person replied and said, 'Hey, I lost my turtle a couple years ago, a girl delivering DoorDash saw a tortoise last night, had her dad Google to see if anyone lost a tortoise, and they contacted me,'" she told PEOPLE.

That neighbor told Iverson that the delivery driver had freed Elliot from a drainage ditch. The sighting gave Iverson hope that Elliot would be found. It also showed her that the community was rooting for them and wasn't going to let anything happen to the tortoise. So the Iversons shared the story more widely using NextDoor and the Oro Valley Community private Facebook page.

“The whole community just came together in terms of watching for him. We put up flyers, we put up pictures, stuff on people’s mailboxes. We actually saw a van driving around last night, really slow along with us, trying to find him. So, it was just an incredible outpour of people trying to help us out,” Gary told local television news station KOLD News 13.

The Iversons have had Elliot since he was a baby, and it's clear how much they love him. They could have never anticipated how much their community would show up for them in their time of need. Though they've lived in Arizona for more than 20 years, they're newer to their neighborhood and haven't really had a chance to get to know many of their neighbors. Clearly, that didn't matter when it came to finding their beloved pet.

“It really gives you a sense of community, of friendship and knowing that if this happened to somebody else, we would be right there with them as well, trying to help them out. Oro valley has a really strong community in trying to help each other,” Gary said.

About a day and a half after the Iversons discovered Elliot's disappearance, they got a call that Elliot had been found. He was about a half mile away from home, caught in the fence of a horse farm. Naturally, he was hungry and thirsty, and had allegedly had an encounter with a cactus. But all in all, he was in good shape. Because of where he was situated, the family was unable to use a car to retrieve him, so they decided to cart him home in a wagon.

"He came right to me when he saw me, but we tried to put him in the wagon, and he was having no part of that. So we just pulled the wagon, and he followed us all the way across that property, across the neighbor's property, to our car, and then it took two of us to lift him in the SUV and trot him home," Cindy told PEOPLE. It's good to see he was still ready to walk despite his ordeal.

Elliot's escape showed his owners what community can be. It's really heartwarming to see a whole group of strangers step up and join in to help, even though they didn't have to. Thankfully Elliot is safely home, and the Iversons are planning to reinforce their fence so he can't escape again. We love a happy ending.

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Joy

AriZona Iced Tea co-founder refuses to raise price above 99 cents, inflation be damned

The price has held steady since 1992 and Don Vultaggio is determined to keep it that way.

Arizona Iced Tea/Twitter

The price of AriZona Iced Tea hasn't changed in 30 years.

In 1992, a new canned iced tea brand arrived in convenience stores throughout the U.S. The large, Southwest-themed can of AriZona iced tea would set you back $0.99, nearly the cost of a gallon of gas.

I was in high school in 1992. I now have adult children, gas prices are more than quadruple what they were back then and that same can of iced tea costs … $0.99.

The folks at AriZona Iced Tea haven't changed their recommended selling price in 30 years, through various periods of inflation, economic upheaval and a global pandemic. Even now, as COVID-19 and war in Europe is squeezing inflation to uncomfortable places, as even the cost of the aluminum to make the cans is going up, AriZona is refusing to budge on its base price.

Unlike many popular drink brands that are owned by large parent companies such as Coca-Cola or PepsiCo, AriZona is privately owned. That gives the people in charge the ability to make radical financial choices like this.

"I’m committed to that 99-cent price," AriZona co-founder and chairman Don Vultaggio told the Los Angeles Times. "When things go against you, you tighten your belt.

"I don't want to do what the bread guys and the gas guys and everybody else are doing," he added. "Consumers don't need another price increase from a guy like me."

PSA: Our recommended selling price for AriZona in the USA is still 99c! The can on the right is from Canada, where $1.29 converts to around 99c!\n\nDon\u2019t worry fam, we still got you https://twitter.com/GOD_SPEEDXVII/status/1350244559519838208\u00a0\u2026
— AriZona Iced Tea (@AriZona Iced Tea) 1611156977

"A guy like me," to be clear, is a company founder worth $4.3 billion who sells around three billion cans of tea per year. So yeah, he really doesn't need to pinch the average American to maximize his profits at this point. However, "don't need to make more money" isn't often a real-world reason for businesses to not try to make as much as they possibly can, regardless of how it impacts consumers.

Of course, most of us don't expect prices to remain steady forever. We expect incremental price increases over time, and don't generally mind as long as we don't feel any drastic changes. But it's definitely refreshing to see businesses that insist on keeping prices low, especially when so many take advantage of inflation news to gouge people unnecessarily.

Take Costco, for instance. You can buy a ginormous hot dog, top it with all the ketchup, mustard, relish and onions your heart desires, and wash it down with a 24-oz soda for a ridiculous $1.50. The meal combo has been the same price since 1985, which resulted in an absolutely epic (and also totally true) tale of Costco founder Jim Sinegal telling Costco CEO Craig Jelinek, "‘If you raise the [price of the] effing hot dog, I will kill you." Rather than raise the price, Costco created its own hot dog manufacturing plant.

pic.twitter.com/uCxDiZCxel
— knifefarty \ud83c\udff4\u200d\u2620\ufe0f (@knifefarty \ud83c\udff4\u200d\u2620\ufe0f) 1649971330

AriZona isn't just sitting back and taking the hit, though. One way it's cutting costs is by narrowing the can at the top to use less aluminum, the price of which has gone up due to tariffs in addition to overall inflation.

“If you keep doing those things, you can kind of offset costs and rising costs, and get the consumer value and the ability to buy your product and everybody’s happy,” Vultaggio explained to TODAY.

"Everything (people are) buying today there’s a price increase on," he said. "We’re trying to hold the ground and hold for a consumer who is pinched on all fronts. I’ve been in business a long time and candidly I’ve never seen anything like what’s going on now."

In a world that's experienced so much change and upheaval in recent years, it's nice to know that at least one thing is holding steady—even if it is just a can of iced tea.

(Also nice to now they have a sense of humor about it. Check out their April Fool's Day tweet with their 9 cent mini-can.)

Inflation has gotten out of control and though we cannot control the economy, we can control our products. So we decided to make The 9 Cent Mini Can! NOW AVAILABLE! https://drinkarizona.com/products/green-tea-2oz-tiny-can\u00a0\u2026pic.twitter.com/4spTL5Bfxx
— AriZona Iced Tea (@AriZona Iced Tea) 1648831087

From Your Site Articles

arizona

Woman shocked when her Grubhub pizza was delivered by the police instead of her driver

Tempe Police Department keeping things hot 'n' ready.

'Something shifted' since COVID: High school teacher shares the reason why he's quitting

“Part of me feels like I’m abandoning these kids."

Tucson biology teacher quits over students not being able to put down their phones

What to know about the 1864 abortion ban Arizona's Supreme Court says is 'now enforceable'

The legal code it comes from also outlaws interracial marriage and forbids minorities from testifying against white people in court.

Arizona election official posts perfect response to woman who received two mail-in ballots

These kinds of clear, concise explanations are the best way to battle misinformation about how votes actually get counted.

Arizona couple ties the knot in the same place they met, the mayonnaise aisle

"We don't have that many more years to do something dumb and stupid."

A community in Arizona rallied together when their neighbor's pet tortoise wandered away from home

Elliot the tortoise had everyone from neighbors to DoorDash delivery drivers looking for him.

AriZona Iced Tea co-founder refuses to raise price above 99 cents, inflation be damned

The price has held steady since 1992 and Don Vultaggio is determined to keep it that way.

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