Goodyear Police in Arizona arrested CBS 5 journo Jonathan Lowe Monday afternoon while he was on assignment, reporting on a former Arizona State University football player who allegedly sacrificed the family dog by putting him in a smoker in order to appease an angry God.

That doesn’t begin to explain the kind of day Lowe was having, however.

“Lowe chose to use the front yard of a residence to relieve himself,” Goodyear Police Department spokeswoman Lisa Kutis tells New Times. “An onlooker from across the street called it in to officers. They approached him, he said he’d had to relieve himself, and they arrested him.”

Lowe was handcuffed and taken to the Goodyear Police station, where he was booked, cited, and released. Kutis says Lowe was cited under Goodyear code violation 11-1-30, “public urination or defecation,” a Class 1 misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $2,500 or six months in jail. 

Goodyear police haven’t released the arrest report, but the department confirms that the citation was for defecation. Kutis says the arrest took place at about 3:10 p.m., and that at the time various media outlets had been “in the neighborhood of the home where the dog incident took place.”

News of Lowe’s arrest was reported by TV news industry gossip site FTVLive.com, which published a photo of the reporter being taken away in handcuffs beneath the headline “Cops Bust the Potty Reporter.” A subsequent article on the site claimed Lowe’s arrest “was the talk inside the Phoenix newsrooms” and that “two competing stations had video of Lowe being lead [sic] away.” 

Bizarrely, there was no further news about the former football player who smoked the dog to appease God.