Mario Francisco Hernandez is a romantic chap. This 22-year-old Los Angeles man painted 'Will you marry me?' on his car. The car proved handy when his girlfriend, the mother of his two young children, refused his proposal: he used it to chase her through a Burger King car park. The chase ended when two of his tyres couldn't cope with his attempt to mount a kerb. Hernandez faces a charge of felonious assault with a deadly weapon.
Clearly, one shouldn't be on the wrong side of an argument in central Kentucky. After some drinking and some arguing, Troy Holt, 47, cut off Harvey Westmoreland's beard while 51-year-old James Hill held a sickle blade against Westmoreland and his brother. Hill and Holt then forced Westmoreland to eat his own beard. Both have been sentenced to probation.
A squad of police liberated a Manhattan park from seven men who were
using chess tables there, since this is designated as a no-adults area.
While, or perhaps because, no children were present, the men - who
sometimes gave chess lessons to children there at local parents'
behest - were given tickets to appear in criminal court.
A sign states: 'Adults allowed in playground areas only when
accompanied by a child under the age of 12'. One of the men arrested,
49-year-old Yacahuda Harrison, said that he saw the signs several
months before he was given a ticket there and 'asked the ranger if we
had permission to be there. The ranger said, "Oh no, that's fine -
that's only written for paedophiles."'
According to AP reports, a female hit a male during a fight at a house party in the US state of Georgia, and this gentleman said he wouldn't retaliate by hitting a female; instead, he would hit the next man to walk past. When Bobby Tillman, 18, walked past, the four people who'd been fighting turned on him, beating him to death. All four - Quantez Devonta Mallory, Horace Damon Coleman, Emanuel Benjamin Boykins, and Tracen Lamar Franklin - have been charged with Tillman's murder.
The husband of 47-year-old Rochelle Cremona-Simmons reported her missing, and New Mexico state police began a search for her rental sport utility vehicle. It was found on University of New Mexico grounds with three parking tickets on it. The parking attendants who had ticketed the vehicle three days in a row assumed the woman slumped in the front seat was sleeping. She had actually killed herself there.
After separating, Turkey's Ramazan and Emine Çalçoban continued to
argue with each other, by mobile phone. In August 2007, the
24-year-old Ramazan decided to send a message to Emine: 'you
change the topic whenever you run out of arguments'. Faulty
localisation meant that Emine's mobile phone didn't interpret it that
way: because an 'i' appeared with one rather than two dots over it,
Emine read: 'you change the topic whenever they are fucking you'.
The 20-year-old woman showed the message to her father, who rang
Ramazan to yell at him for treating her like a prostitute. Arriving
at the family's home to apologise, Ramazan was greeted by Emine, her
sisters, her father, and several knives. Ramazan removed a knife from
his chest and turned it back on Emine. He fled, she bled to death,
and Ramazan later hanged himself in jail. Now, Emine's family members
are facing trial.
Solicitor Delphine Branquet told a court in Nantes, France, that her client was arrested on his birthday for stealing a car and driving without a licence after celebrating his 18th birthday. He was arrested at 10:49pm, she explained, while he had been born at 10:50pm about 18 years earlier. Given precedent that the time of birth is what counts rather than just the date, the court declared that it was not competent to hear the case, and Branquet's client will now come before a youth court.
The Times of India reports that a large group of male passengers seated themselves in the New Delhi metro carriage that had been reserved for women as a result of sexual harassment. Complaints about the men's presence led to a police crackdown. When the women in the carriage saw officers arriving at a station in the suburb of Gurgaon, 'they got the courage to teach the men a lesson', according to Gurgaon police commissioner S. Deswal. Accordingly, in addition to receiving fines from police, male commuters were made to do sit-ups on the platform.
According to thelocal.de, a 64-year-old pensioner in Gumperda, Germany, recently decided to brick off the entrance to his cellar. Having done so, he alleges, he then realised that he was left with no easy way to leave the cellar. Eating the food and drink he had conveniently taken with him, he camped out down there for a few days and then knocked down a wall in order to escape. He chose the wall shared with neighbours he'd been arguing with for months. When they heard drilling noises, the neighbours summoned the police. Cops were waiting when he emerged.
A 69-year-old woman in the Paris suburb of Épinay-sous-Sénart took a rather more patient approach. When her bathroom lock broke, she was trapped within and spent three weeks drinking water from the tap and tapping on the pipes at night to try to catch people's attention. Neighbours meanwhile launched a petition to find out who was making the noise, in order to get a stop put to it. Shortly before it would have stopped naturally, other neighbours, who hadn't seen the woman for a while, broke into her flat to check on her. She is recovering in hospital.
Also in France, we have duck farmer Michel Rouyer. Police discovered
12 cannabis plants and five kilos of marijuana at his home when they
visited in response to a theft report.
Facing drugs charges, Rouyer explained that the substance had been
recommended by an unnamed specialist as a medicine for his 150 ducks,
and his lawyer chipped in: 'This is for real, not one has worms and
they're all in excellent health.' After admitting that he did smoke
some of the drug himself, Rouyer was given a one-month suspended
sentence and fined 500 euros.
Daniel Clarke was shooting at pigeons with an air rifle near his
Norwich home when two boys in a nearby tree engaged him in
conversation. When one of the boys told the 22-year-old Clarke that
he isn't a pigeon, Clarke 'asked him if he was sure and started
firing randomly', prosecutor Christopher Youell said. Clarke
allegedly continued by saying: 'Wait there. I'll see if I can hit you
from here.' When he hit one of the boys, age 12, a couple of
centimetres from his eye, the boys ran home.
Judge Peter Jacobs told Clarke he could have blinded the boy, and
Clarke was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.
Our next story comes from an overcrowded prison in Peru, where guards asked convicted drug trafficker Jason Sanford Stalig Conquet, 32, about the smell coming from the concrete bench-like ledge he'd built in a corner of his cell. The Dutchman owned up to having strangled his 22-year-old girlfriend during an argument when she'd visited in August. Her body has now been removed from where it was buried in the corner, and Stalig Conquet faces murder charges.
According to AP reports, police in Spartanburg, South Carolina, found
a handgun in a box at a man's grave. It emerged that the weapon had
been left there by a 28-year-old woman who explained that the man had
given it to her 12 years earlier and she wanted to give it back. The
woman, who hadn't been feeling well, said that a spiritual adviser had
told her she would feel better after returning something that had been
given to her.
No charges have been filed.
The next item is from Colorado, where three soldiers stationed at Fort Carson broke into a medical marijuana dispensary and managed to lock themselves inside during a burglary attempt. Police officers state that they were responding to an unrelated call nearby when they heard someone banging on the glass within the dispensary. The soldiers told the officers that they planned to steal the marijuana so that they could destroy it, not smoke it or sell it.
Also in Colorado, Mitchell Reed wanted to do a favour for a friend who had been arrested for a drugs offence. To keep people from seeing the friend's name in the local papers' police blotter sections, the 23-year-old Reed stole thousands of copies of the free newspapers The Aspen Daily News and The Aspen Times and dumped them in rubbish bins behind a grocery store. A maintenance worker saw him, and Reed confessed. Both newspapers have now printed an apology from Reed.
According to Nebraska's Lincoln Journal Star, a 19-year-old woman and her 30-year-old boyfriend had begun arguing when the woman decided that she didn't want her name associated with him. She tried to slice the tattoo of her name off his neck. According to police captain Anthony Butler, the boyfriend suffered only minor injuries, mainly scratches.
Two men robbed a delivery driver for Fu Wong Restaurant at gunpoint in Springfield, Massachusetts, stealing the food, $200, a mobile phone, and a ring. Apparently still hungry, one of the men, 23-year-old Edward Blatch, visited the restaurant later in the day. The reason we know his identity is that the driver was there and recognised him. The driver and cooks held Blatch until the police arrived.
Arkansas media report on the death of two-year-old Harley Davidson.
The girl's mother, Kristy Davidson, claims that she was at work
when her 26-year-old boyfriend, Jesse Holloman, arrived to tell her
that something had happened to the baby. She said that she raced back
to his mobile home and found that all of the food from the fridge had
been removed, to make space inside for the baby girl.
Holloman, by contrast, claims that he'd fed Harley half a bottle of
the antibiotic Amoxicillin, killing the child and placing the body in
the fridge because Kristy had told him to do so. He said she'd asked
him to kill the dog also but that he couldn't find it.
Holloman has been charged with first-degree murder.
In other dead baby news, Rhonda Coshatt was checking up on dozing niece
Lyndsey Fiddler when she heard Fiddler's washing machine make
clunking noises at the end of its cycle. Coshatt discovered Fiddler's
10-day-old baby, Maggie Trammel, entangled with the laundry within.
In a call to emergency services, Coshatt is heard to say to Fiddler:
'No, I did not kill your baby. You did.'
According to court documents, the mother had been using
methamphetamine, amphetamines, benzodiazepine, and opiates. An arrest
for drug use while she was pregnant led Fiddler's family to try to get
her children taken into care. Now, her remaining two boys have been.
A soldier in central Sri Lanka was arrested for possession of marijuana, and he determined to make his escape from the police station in Nuwara Eliya. He had a grenade on his person - which the police had failed to notice - so threatened to detonate it. He ran off, throwing the grenade only when guards stopped him at the entrance. The guards and a dozen or so others were injured in the blast. He himself was the sole fatality.
Hirota Noguchi, 24, visited the police in Fukouka, Japan, to report that he had lost his bag. He was in luck: someone had turned it in at a nearby police box. Best of all, nobody had stolen the contents. When officers asked him about the cannabis within the bag, Noguchi fled. However, he was tracked down with ease, since the bag also contained his name cards.
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Kyle James Eckman tried that old trick of stealing clothing by changing in a dressing room and walking out of the shop while wearing the loot and carrying one's own clothes in a shopping bag. The 22-year-old Eckman might have had more luck if the items he had chosen weren't two size-10 women's high heels. He was stopped just outside the shoe shop.
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© 2010 Anna Shefl