Maurice Owens reported slipping on a banana peel in a lift at a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority station. After he fell, apparently suffering intense pain to the hip and leg, he was taken to hospital. He later filed a claim for $15,000 in compensation. However, security footage shows that there was no banana peel in the lift before Owens arrived on the scene, his claim was not honoured. Owen has been charged with second-degree fraud.
Court documents in New Mexico indicate that Marlene Tapia was
strip-searched after police officer Blanca Zapater determined that Tapia
had violated the terms of her probation. During the search, Zapater
saw a plastic bag protruding from Tapia's vagina. Zapater is accused
of then using pepper spray on said vagina, twice.
A lawsuit filed on Tapia's behalf by the American Civil Liberties
Union states: 'Spraying Ms. Tapia on the genitals would not cause the
baggy to become dislodged.' It did, however, allegedly cause her
several weeks of painful urination and other symptoms and led to
disciplinary action against Zapater.
Larry Barnett put his mobile phone in his pocket after looking up the
contact details of a former employee of his Jonesboro, Arkansas,
used-car dealership. Shortly after that, Barnett's bottom rang the
man, James Macon, who says that, when answering, he heard Barnett, 68,
tell someone 'I don't care if you have to burn his house to the ground
with him in it. I don't care what you have to do - make it look like
an accident' and then give the hit man the location of Macon's
house.
Macon promptly called the police, who arrived to find the call from
Barnett's phone still active. They had Macon fill in a report at the
station. When he returned to his house, someone had started a gas
leak there.
Barnett has been arrested for conspiracy to commit murder, and the
police report that they had been investigating him for months for
defrauding his bank - he had obtained loans for nonexistent
vehicles, supplying made-up vehicle identification numbers.
A couple from Key Largo, Florida, were staying at a rental property in Louisiana when they were shipped a large box they weren't expecting. They had it returned to UPS. After it arrived a second time, they opened it. Inside were two locked suitcases, which they were able to open once they had driven back to Florida. Inside were five kilos of marijuana, now in the custody of the sheriff's office.
When police officers in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, found a car that had crashed into a wall, they towed it to a garage. A day and a half after the crash, a 30-year-old woman crawled out of the boot of the car and explained that she had been drunk and high when she crashed the vehicle. She'd climbed into the boot to sober up without having to face the police. Her driver's licence has been revoked, according to thelocal.de .
Tom Wagner took a nap on a flight from Louisiana to Texas. His plan was to catch a connecting flight to California. When he awoke, however, it was dark, the ExpressJet plane had long since landed, and there was no-one else aboard. He rang his girlfriend to report that he was locked inside the craft, but he was released only when ground crew began servicing the aeroplane. Airline spokeswoman Samantha Harrison said that ExpressJet are investigating how the flight crew managed to miss Wagner when doing their sweeps of the plane.
Jackie Conners used to work at Gusano's Pizzeria, in Conway, Arkansas. When seeing a customer breast-feed her child after drinking 'a high number of alcoholic beverages', she told her supervisors. When they failed to intervene, Conners rang the police. The customer, 28-year-old Tasha Adams, was arrested on a charge of endangering the welfare of a minor and Conners was released from her job a couple of days later.
Newspapers in Sweden report on a 51-year-old prisoner at
a minimum-security prison in Östragård. The man escaped in order to
visit a dentist, after having been denied medical care for his toothache.
He had the tooth extracted and then turned himself in, to serve the
remainder of his one-month sentence. He explained: 'My whole face was
swollen. I just couldn't stand it anymore.'
He was given a warning, and one day was added to his sentence.
A man near Gold Beach, Oregon, purchased a 1969 Chieftain battle tank,
but the delivery truck carrying it to him was unable to cope with the
rugged terrain near his home. So the truck driver unloaded the 50-ton
military vehicle, and the purchaser's caretaker, 58-year-old Jeffrey
Glossop, had a look at the operator's manual and tried to drive the
tank up the offending hill. Speaking for the state police, Lieutenant
Gregg Hastings said that the tank slipped out of gear and rolled
across the busy highway and through a guardrail. On Glossop's second
attempt, the tank took out another guardrail and rolled down an
embankment.
Glossop faces charges of reckless driving and criminal mischief.
Hastings reports that the tank is none the worse for wear.
Kansas's Jeanne Ouellette was trying on bras in a Kohl's department store dressing room when she noticed a mobile phone camera pointed at her through a gap in the wall. Ouellette exited the changing room and chased after the man behind the phone, running through the store topless. She later said: 'I was at a store in a very private place, and I was enraged and I wanted to get the phone.' She gave up the chase when reaching the store's front doors, but others continued the chase, catching peeping tom Jeremy Bradley about three blocks from the Kohl's. He has been arrested.
Pennsylvania's Gettysburg Times reports that police officer Thomas Knaper saw 'a flashlight being used inside' a historic building in the darkness. Knaper entered the building and handcuffed the three people inside, one of whom claimed to be a tour guide for the other two. While the three were held at gunpoint, police rang the owner, who confirmed that the Thanksgiving ghost tour was fully authorised to check out the allegedly haunted building.
A 41-year-old man living in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, rang emergency services at 3:17am to request 'a pop and some smokes', according to a statement by Canadian police. The dispatcher denied the request, so he rang again, also asking for 'another mickey of vodka' this time. When that didn't work, he warned that he had a gun and would hurt himself or others if ignored. Officers than paid him a visit, but they didn't have the requested snacks, so the man lost interest and fell asleep. Officers entered, took the man's unregistered rifle, and arrested him. He faces various charges.
Chinese media report on Zou Bin, who found himself sans mobile phone after passing out during a post-stag-night taxi ride. He began sending text messages to his phone from a friend's device, such as 'I know you are the man who sat beside me. I can assure you that I will find you' and threats to use his contacts, in the bar business, if the miscreant didn't return hisiPhone to the address he indicated. The phone was not sent back; however, four days later he did receive a package by courier: 11 pieces of paper, on which the telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of his 1,000+ contacts had been written out by hand.
In Florida, Shana Beck's young daughter began crying at school and showed a teacher a small bag of white powder. The girl explained that her mother and a friend had been looking for the baggy the previous night after dropping it in a car. It had somehow ended up in the girl's satchel. The mother, 29, is due in court later the month, and the Florida Department of Children and Family Services are investigating matters.
Also in Florida, 32-year-old Stacy Slabach apparently likes cocaine. She visited the Pasco County sheriff's evidence building with her mother to collect medicine left in an impounded car. While her mother was talking to officers, Slabach went to use the toilet, where an employee walked in, saw a needle in Slabach's arm, and summoned sheriff's officers. The cocaine-addled Slabach was then taken elsewhere in the building, to jail.
North Carolina's A'Darrin Washington had been receiving treatment at Cumberland County Hospital for 10 years for cancer-related recurrent pneumonia. During his latest visit, he was given the wrong medicine for several days. After giving him one dose of the correct medicine, hospital staff summoned a taxi to convey him back home to his mother, noting that he was 'uncooperative' and 'refusing to talk or move'. As hospital personnel transferred Washington from a wheelchair into the cab, they even had to cross his legs for him. When he arrived home, about 45 minutes later, his mother noted that he was cold to the touch and quite dead. She is seeking compensatory and punitive damages mostly related to negligence.
In South Africa, the Action on Hearing Loss group have complained that
'deaf or hard-of-hearing people across the world were completely
excluded from one of the biggest events in recent history', Nelson
Mandela's funeral. Complaints of a similar nature were received
from several countries, because the government had hired an interpreter
for the deaf whose gestures appeared meaningless. He 'just invented
his signs as he went along [and] couldn't even say "thank you",' said
Delphin Hlungwane, one of the many outraged sign language
interpreters.
The man in question, Thamsanqa Jantjie, says that he has interpreted
at several large events in the past and isn't a fake. He did apologise
- but for suffering a 'schizophrenia attack' while interpreting.
New Jersey media report on a 42-year-old Trenton man who awoke in pain after sleeping off a night of drinking. He mentioned the pain to his brother, who explained that there was a knife in his back. He had been stabbed 10 hours earlier during fisticuffs on his porch. The man was taken to hospital, where a 12.5 cm knife blade was recovered from his body.
According to China Daily, police arrested a man who lives in
Yiwu, Zheijiang province, after he arranged to borrow money from a man
in a nearby village to help his parents build a new house. The
problem was that the man, identified as Peng, went to the wrong house
to collect the money. No-one was there, so Peng took the roughly
2,500 euros' worth of cash he needed and left an IOU giving his name
and contact information.
Police said that Peng insisted that he hadn't broken any laws, since
he had left the IOU note.
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© 2013 Anna Shefl