While driving his truck in Texas, 21-year-old university student Chance Bothe sent the text message 'I need to quit texting because I could die in a car accident'. Rather, he sent another message - 'b right there' - and veered off a bridge, ending up in a ravine. He sustained brain injury and a fractured skull, was resuscitated three times, and suffered breaks to numerous bones (including his neck). A six-month hospital stay later, Chance may soon visit his friend.
Looking at his girlfriend's Facebook page, Tennessee's Lowell Turpin, 40, saw a photograph of a man he didn't recognise. Asserting that she was planning to have an affair with the man, he confronted her and pointed to the photo on a laptop computer. According to a police report, she explained that the man in the photo was US Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and he started hitting the laptop against the wall and then punched her in the face. Turpin has been arrested on charges of domestic assault.
Vermont's Roger Pion recently was arrested for possession of marijuana
and resisting arrest. Perhaps not content with his punishment, he
decided to vent his anger at the sheriff's department and thereby
collect 14 more charges. Pion, 34, drove a large farm tractor into the
sheriff's department car park and rolled it over a few cruisers and an
innocent transport van.
With none of their seven vehicles intact, sheriff's officers
pursued Pion on foot, until Pion attempted to back over them too.
Although they retreated, tractors aren't the fastest of escape
vehicles, and state police soon had the farm vehicle surrounded.
The most serious of the charges against Pion carries a penalty of up
to 16 years in prison.
According to Michigan's Livingston Daily, a couple aged 75 and 72
were in bed asleep when they heard someone enter their home at about
3:30am. The intruder entered the bedroom and climbed into bed with
them, whereupon the 75-year-old man grabbed his pistol and wife. They
rang the police from another room.
When officers arrived, the intruder didn't respond to their commands
- he remained 'heavily asleep with his shorts partly down'. Being
handcuffed roused him, and he said: 'This isn't my house'. The man,
27, who lived a few doors down, explained that he'd gone out for a
night of drinking after putting his young children to bed.
![[IMG: Inflatable woman tied to tree]](images/doll.jpg)
Ananova reports, with the accompanying CEN photo, that 67-year-old Lin
Chen, a pensioner in Ningbo, China, was tired of motorists speeding
through nearby traffic lights and otherwise driving dangerously while
passing her home. She purchased an inflatable female, dressed her/it
in red underthings, and tied the blow-up doll to a tree outside her
home. She is quoted as saying: 'I thought that drivers would slow
down if I could give them something worth looking at', and police as
stating that this 'isn't a method we would use, but we can't say it
isn't working'.
According to AP reports, two Pennsylvania technical-college students - Randall Smith, 21, and Artie Goodwine, 18 - told a pair of pizzeria employees that they had been selected to appear in the reality television programme You Just Got Robbed. After the video was shot, it became quite clear that there was no television show and that the pizza workers just got robbed, losing $20.
The Dorset Fire and Rescue Service were prompted to send out the public-service message 'Use your dryers, stop pants fires' on Twitter after a man in Weymouth attempted to dry two pairs of socks and two pairs of underpants in his microwave oven. He ended up setting his flat on fire. Others in the building led the man to safety while the fire was put out.
Under cover of darkness, someone breached the chain-link fence
surrounding New Mexico's 23-metre Bernalillo County swimming
pool and made off with the black vinyl lane markers from the bottom of
the pool. In addition to pulling up the stripes fused to the lining
of the pool, the intruders removed the crosses marking where swimmers
kick off the wall, and they took all of the vinyl with them. The
community swimming team noticed the vandalism the next morning.
Ed Chismar, director of the county's Parks and Recreation
Department, asked 'Why would you do that?' and concluded that it must
have been a prank, albeit one that required quite a bit of effort.