Japan Press Weekly

Tweet

2013 January 16 - 22 [US FORCES]

USS GW crew members arrested one after another

Crew members of the U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington, deployed to the U.S. Yokosuka Naval Base in Kanagawa Prefecture, were arrested on January 21one after another.

The Kanagawa Prefectural Police Department’s Tobe Station arrested John Canfield, a 22-year-old seaman recruit, on suspicion of inflicting bodily injury.

The suspect allegedly hit a 28-year-old Japanese man in the face in the afternoon on the same day in a commercial building attached to Yokohama Station.

According to the police, when the Japanese man saw the sailor seemingly verbally harassing a female passerby and told him to stop it, the sailor suddenly attacked the man. The man physically restrained the serviceman, handing him over to the police.

The seaman was dead drunk and told policemen that he could neither remember anything nor understand the reason he was taken to the police station, said the police.

On the same day, the Yokosuka Police Station in the prefecture arrested Manuel Silva, a 20-year-old seaman apprentice of the USS George Washington, on a charge of trespassing into a Japanese woman’s house.

The sailor allegedly entered the woman’s house in Yokosuka City around 2:50 a.m. that day.

The police said that they detected a level of 0.3 milligram of alcohol a liter in the suspect’s exhalation test.

The U.S. Forces have imposed a night-time curfew on all U.S. servicemen in Japan between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. following the rape of a Japanese woman by two U.S. sailors in Okinawa in October 2012.