Alexander Sperber woke up one morning with a decision to bring a bit of comedy to real life. The 25-year-old Florida man's aspirations to be a comedian led him perform a mock hold-up at a bank, demanding money while holding his hand in the shape of a gun. The teller gave him a bag containing about $4,700 and a red dye pack. The dye pack soon exploded all over his clothes. It was not long before a naked man with a red-stained wrist cast headed onto the streets and began throwing money at passers-by. Rather than a poorly developed sense of humour, Sperber is being charged with bank robbery.
It sounds like something from a hidden-camera TV segment aimed at
capturing people's reactions to cries for help from inside an ATM.
Customers using a cash machine in Corpus Christi, Texas, started
getting unusual slips from the receipt slot. One implored 'Please
help. I'm stuck in here and I don't have my phone. Please call my
boss'. A customer finally took the matter seriously, contacting the
police.
After detecting a faint voice from inside the contraption, an
officer kicked in the door to the Bank of America room leading to the
back of the cash machine. Within was a contractor who had been
changing the room's lock. Police lieutenant Chris Hooper explained:
'Apparently, he left his cell phone and the swipe card he needed to
get out of the room outside in his truck.'
Wendy Burch covers 'light news' for the KTLA Morning News. Last
month, producers sent her to cover an 'ironman' competition on
California's Hermosa Beach, summed up by the motto 'Run, Paddle,
Chug'. The last of these, a reference to drinking a six-pack of beer
as quickly as possible, explains why a participant she chose to
interview amid the event's chaos had 'puke here' written on his back
in marker pen. She found out about the latter instructions only after
the live broadcast during which someone did just that.
Then, unaware that a glitch had caused he video feed to the studio to
freeze the stream of vomit in mid-air just before it hit her, she
continued reporting. Burch later said: 'I assumed I was still live.
So, for the better part of the next two minutes, I just kept
interviewing drunken people, while sudsy substances flew in in the air
and landed in my hair.'
Florida's Ki'ari Pope told her mother's boyfriend that she was having trouble breathing. So the eight-year-old girl was whisked off to hospital, where she died. The girl's mother, 22-year-old Marquisia Bonner, explained that Pope hadn't been the same since the dare she'd accepted five months earlier. which emergency surgery proved unable to rectify. The dare was to imitate the protagonist in a video she had watched with her cousin, in which someone purportedly drank boiling water through a straw.
Fifteen volunteer firefighters in Sicily's Ragusa district have been
questioned by police, who were curious about the unusually high number
of fires their group had been called to put out since 2013.
Allegedly, they and their friends rang the emergency number to report
fires, and each member of the team was paid about 10 euros an hour to
extinguish them. The fires did exist: team commander Davide De Vita
is accused of skipping shifts in order to set them. He faces house
arrest.
The fraud, to which most team members have confessed, unravelled
partially because the same phone was used repeatedly but with
the caller giving different names.
Beau Marr noticed a few maggots at ceiling level in her rented flat in
Leeds, and it wasn't long before there were enough flies to prompt a
fumigation. Also, a neighbour started to notice a strong smell from
the flat a man was renting directly above Marr, who says: 'After
ringing police, they told her to look through the letterbox, where she
saw him dead in the hallway', badly decomposed. The landlords,
Sanctuary Group, were informed, but, Marr says, 'something out of a
horror film' remained, with thousands of flies, dead and alive,
'absolutely everywhere; they're all over the floors and the beds'. She
and her baby daughter have been staying with family and friends for
weeks.
Sanctuary Group explained that 'unavoidable delays' had arisen.
For example, relatives had decided not to collect the dead man's
belongings, and the space was left untouched in case a criminal
investigation was necessary. After reporters visited the infestation
site, Marr was informed that she will not be expected to pay rent
while unable to live in the flat and will be reimbursed for her
interim accommodation.
All kinds of things can wake someone up during a camping trip. For a teenaged camp counsellor identified only as Dylan by Denver's KMGH TV, this was taken to an extreme by a 'crunching noise' that awakened him. A black bear was trying to drag him out of his sleeping bag by his head, and the sound was the animal's teeth scraping against his skull. Hearing the commotion, others tried to scare the bear away. Once it decided to drop him and walk off, Dylan was taken to hospital for checks. He was found to have no serious injuries, and he has a good 'I told you so' lined up for the children he had been supervising for the weekend, who had persuaded him, against his better judgement, to let the group sleep under the stars.
Florida's Colleen Walker is one of those mothers who don't think enough about the problems that can arise from leaving a child locked in a hot car. Temperatures in the car reached 43 degrees, and her five-year-old son was sweating and agitated when the 30-year-old Walker and her daughter returned to the vehicle. After officers ascertained that her shopping trip had taken 28 minutes and not the 12 she had claimed, they took her into custody to face charges for child neglect. On the way to jail, she requested that the air-conditioning be turned up because the squad car was too hot.
The police were called to secure New Hampshire's Eagle Mountain Golf
Course against a llama on the loose. The animal's owner, Russ Miller,
explained that the animal had been jumping the relevant electric fence
in order to be a good neighbour: 'Noir has a flock of ducks [on the
other side of the fence] that he watches over, and a bear has taken a
taste for duck eggs and duck.' After chasing the bear off, Noir
visited the sixth fairway, where police officers with rope found him.
Police chief Chris Perley said that Miller plans to make the fence a
bit higher, that authorities will take over Noir's role as protector of
the duck family, and that the events pleased one couple on the golf
course greatly since 'the only thing they'd seen on courses [in
Florida] were crocodiles - 'this was their first llama'.
Florida's Rorn Sorn created drama while in the men's toilets at
Club Lust. Afterward, when a security guard noticed his attempt to
slink out of the strip club, Sorn explained that he had been 'just
trying to take a selfie' and that the rest was an accident. That
attempt to take a selfie had involved accidental firing of a handgun
that Sorn was carrying. The bullet went through the mirror and into
the ladies' toilets.
The police were summoned to deal with matters. Because the
34-year-old Sorn had been convicted of felonies, the gun, ammunition,
and drugs he was carrying were considered a big deal, and he has been
sentenced to more than six years in prison.
Eugene Clark was annoyed about the City of Philadelphia's inaction
over a sinkhole near his home. After water-department workers
addressed issues elsewhere on the street without tending to the
hazard, Clark decided to place traffic cones around it, mainly as a
warning to children playing outside. While Clark, 58, was doing so,
more asphalt gave way, and he fell in, injuring his ankle, wrist, and
lower back. A city firefighter lifted him out half an hour later.
The water department reports that there seems to be a sewer-line
problem and that they will check on the hole in the coming days while
investigating the effluent leak.
According to the Associated Press, a woman in Rheinfelden, Germany, contacted the local police because a man had rung her doorbell, asking to search her balcony. Officers verified that his request was sincere, though embarrassing. He was hunting for his dentures, which he had removed while on a friend's balcony a few floors above. At last report, the 56-year-old man in question had not found his missing teeth.
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© 2017 Anna Shefl