Reading the responses gave me another idea (I don't think any of the replies hit on it directly). Maybe the cops are interpreting his original post as a claim of child abuse; i.e. he's claiming he himself is abusing his children (he's trying to sell them after all). The cops have to investigate this hoax and therefore he's charged with falsely reporting an incident.

I'm not sure that this stands up though... If I come to you with hot dogs strapped to my chest and threaten to blow myself up. Then you - without my knowledge - call the cops, should I be charged?

It's really hard to tell exactly what's going on here based on this messed up article, but I think I've figured it out: Santiago makes a hoax posting on craigslist hoping for a media firestorm. Nobody notices. Santiago reports the posting to Child Protective Services intending to stoke the fire. Police figure out he's the guy that made the original posting which is obviously a joke and charge him with making a false report for wasting their time.

Am I close?

I have the previous generation ATG (D630). It's Dell's entry level "ruggedish" laptop. The monitor is fantastic and the general quality is good (which is the main reason I bought it) However it does have some design issues. The most important one being that the HDD is screwed directly to the external metal chassis. This means ANY sharp jolt to the laptop can destroy your drive. That's exactly what happened to me. I'd just closed the lid when I dropped it at most a half inch back onto the counter. That was enough to kill it.

The ironic thing is that a regular plastic Dell would have protected the drive better by flexing and transmitting less of the shock. I installed an SSD a couple days ago that should bypass this design flaw once and for all. BTW the OCZ Apex is KICKASS!

Richard Dawkins does "demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking". I see him as the atheist's Rush Limbaugh.