Our first item in this final batch of the year comes from Cody, Wyoming, where Andrew C. Crawford made a habit of treating the female staff of two drive-through coffee kiosks to a view of his genitalia. After 4-5 incidents of this nature over 1.5 months, a barista recognised his vehicle in the drive-through queue and began capturing video before taking his order. When his coffee was ready, so was his crotch. In exchange, she had not-quite-boiling water ready to deliver alongside his change. Before leaving the area, he had a lapful of it, alongside charges of public indecency and felonious failure to register as a sex offender.
Refused a refund for a Starbucks drink she'd deemed unsatisfactory, an Oklahoma woman sent in her champion. Her husband, Richard Engle, visited the outlet with a mission but without proof of purchase, so the barista reiterated that no recompense could be provided in the absence of a receipt. Engle therefore snatched the contents of the tip jar. He drove off - but not without bumping the barista a few times with his car in a futile attempt to keep his number plate from being photographed. But he did escape temporarily with $1.32.
Emergency-services personnel in San Jose, California, received a call
for help with eight-month-old twins. Celina Juarez reportedly
explained that she'd held one of her babies, Melani, against her
breast for several minutes in an effort to get the baby to 'latch on'.
Frustrated when no suckling ensued, Juarez placed the girl, unconscious
at this point, on the bed and proceeded to asphyxiate her other
daughter in the same fashion. Next, she asked her mother how to
handle two unresponsive babies.
Ultimately, intensive-care staff weighed in on the matter. Melani
died a day later in hospital, and Juarez, 29, has been charged with
homicide.
After falling at his home and enduring a utility-service cut that left
him with severely frostbitten feet, a 62-year-old man was admitted to
Wisconsin's Spring Valley nursing home. When he fell from his bed
there a few months later, he injured his blackened right foot further
and was left apologising for its stench. After this incident,
care-home administrator Kevin Larson denied nurse Mary K. Brown's
request for amputation, judging the man near death anyway. While
nurses were changing his bandages a few days later, Brown removed the
foot herself, with gauze scissors. Two days later, the man reported
that he'd 'felt everything and it hurt very bad'; after six further
days, he was dead.
Other nurses dashed Brown's hopes of displaying the appendage at her
family's taxidermy shop alongside a 'Wear your boots, kids' sign, so
the funeral home received two separate bags. Their queries prompted
an investigation, in which Larson concluded that Brown had acted for
the man's 'dignity and comfort'. Still, her approach netted her
charges of felonious mayhem and intentionally causing great bodily
harm to an elderly person, and she no longer works at the home.
Several people alerted the Clearwater, Florida, police to the actions of Chad Albert Mason, a 36-year-old man who decided to augment his walking of a neighbour's dog by sodomising the animal. When one of the adult witnesses confronted him, Mason 'removed his penis from the dog and took flight from the scene', according to the police. On his way, he destroyed a church's nativity scene and ripped a mailbox from its moorings. Metres away, Mason made a botched attempt to liberate an unoccupied vehicle, and he was swiftly apprehended.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officers had to deal with the fallout from a
family argument over a game of Monopoly. The incident began with
someone flipping over the game table, and flying game pieces soon gave
way to flying furniture. Matters escalated to John Ronald Dewayne
Armstrong firing a bullet into the floor and chasing his stepsister and
stepfather into the street at gunpoint.
Officer Danny Bean reported that Armstrong soon discovered that
'there are no GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards in life'. He also reported
that alcohol was one ingredient in the family's fun and games.
A 10-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin, boy explained to the police that
the gun he'd been twirling around his finger 'accidentally went off',
fatally shooting his mother in the head while she was doing the laundry
nearby. He later clarified that he'd used the gun-safe keys (stolen
from her) simply because she'd aroused his anger by letting him
oversleep and not letting him buy a VR headset from Amazon. He still
maintained that her death was an accident - she'd stepped into the
line of fire when his intention had been to 'scare her'.
The police discovered that he'd ordered that headset straight away.
Investigation also revealed why relatives had refused to babysit him:
acts such as damaging furniture in the home by setting light to a
balloon filled with flammable liquid, swinging his puppy around by its
tail, and causing multiple surveillance cameras to 'malfunction'.
A 72-year-old hospital patient in Mannheim, Germany, needed her sleep but found the machinery in the room disturbing. The police report that she flipped the relevant switch 'after feeling disturbed by the noise coming from the oxygen device' used by her 79-year-old roommate. Hospital staff noticed and turned it back on, stressing that the machine was sustaining the other woman's life. About an hour later, the oxygen machine lost power again. This time, the roommate required resuscitation and was moved to intensive care. The alleged perpetrator, meanwhile, was moved to jail.
While searching a suspect's home, Greater Manchester Police officers found something unexpected in the wardrobe: colleague PC Elaine Taylor. Not only had Taylor chosen to hide there upon detecting that a police raid was in progress, but she had - on multiple occasions - failed to report the presence of 'a wanted person of whom the officer had full knowledge of, but chose to acquiesce and ignore' [sic]. She has since faced allegations of 'discreditable conduct and honesty and integrity' [sic], and she has been sacked for gross misconduct.
Want more?
Follow the link for an earlier
bundle of Anna's News Clippings.
Want later clippings? Well, just head into the new year for the
January pile.
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