Two U.S. Marines helped authorities arrest a man suspected of attempted murder on Tuesday while they were playing Pokémon Go in Fullerton.
The viral craze combines popular Pokémon characters with smartphone mapping capabilities to guide players to different sites in a scavenger hunt.
The Marines, Seth Ortega and Javier Soch, were searching for Pokémon characters in a park when noticed a man behaving suspiciously nearby.
Local ABC News affiliate KABC-7 reports:
Soch said his game froze and he happened to look up and noticed a man carrying a red plastic rose.
Ortega and Soch said they watched the man approach a woman and her three children.
The woman and her children quickly ran away from the man, according to Ortega and Soch.
The mother called 911 while Ortega and Soch kept a watchful eye on the man.
Ortega and Soch said they watched the man approach another woman and her two children, who were also playing Pokemon Go.
At that point, the Marines rushed over and stopped the man. He was arrested for child annoyance, but was also found to have an outstanding warrant for attempted murder.
Earlier this week, a woman playing Pokémon Go in Wyoming found the dead body of a man who had recently drowned.
Some public sites have tried to discourage people from congregating in search of Pokémon characters. The U.S. Holocaust Museum complained this week that visitors had played the game in the facility.
“Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism… We are trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game,” a museum representative told the Washington Post.