A 10-year-old boy in Fort Wayne, Indiana, found some sweeties in the home where he waits in the morning for the school bus. He shared the candy with a few others on the bus. When the driver learned from one of the students that someone had passed out sweets that tasted bad, she collected the boy's bag of turquoise pills and did some research on them. The police recovered 133 Ecstasy pills, worth an estimated $3,000, from the driver and students.
California's Michael Codde, 44, held a slumber party at which he
introduced nine- and 10-year-old boys to his 'whipped cream game', in
which the loser of a video game had to lick whipped cream from other boys'
toes. Codde, who worked as a substitute teacher for the Pajaro Valley
Unified School District, videotaped five boys playing the game. Two of
the boys later said they had played the game with Codde before.
He was arrested. Although no-one accused Codde of touching the boys,
Judge John Salazar said the game was clearly directed for sexual arousal,
and among the images on Codde's computer were pictures of men and boys
engaged in toe-sucking. In a letter to the court, Codde explained that
his poor judgement was caused by lack of acceptance by adult society due
in part to his being overweight. He pleaded guilty to felony child
molestation and has been sentenced to a year in jail.
For three years, Cortez Thurman and family rented a Milwaukee home in which there was a concrete block buried in the basement. He said: 'You could see like a little lump in it, and then it looked like a foot sticking up, kind of, but with cement over it'. His family joked that there was a dead body encased in the concrete. Two years ago, a new family moved in and had similar thoughts. While recently in the home for other purposes, local police verified that it was no joke. An autopsy has been ordered. Zaporah Thurman said: 'I used to sit on that body [...]. Still can't believe it.'
Burglars in New Mexico stole 20 rifles from the Santa Fe High School ROTC programme. They accessed the guns' storage area through a hatch in the roof after a failed entry attempt via a heating vent. Deputy Police Chief Eric Johnson said that the rifles, which are used in drills and ceremonies, are 'almost like props'. The weapons are non-functional, and 'there's nothing they can do to make them work again'.
According to AP reports, cargo worker Muhammet Ahmet Mursi fell asleep while loading suitcases onto a flight from Saudi Arabia to Turkey. He woke above south-eastern Turkey when things began getting a bit chilly for him atop the boxes and suitcases. Television station NTV reported that he screamed loudly enough that the pilots heard him and pumped some hot air in his direction. Physician Yusuf Yagmur said Mursi was suffering from pneumonia and was in a panic when moved from the airport in Diyarbakir by stretcher. He will be returned to Saudi Arabia when his treatment is complete.
Beth Ortiz, 35, of Nashua, New Hampshire, wanted husband Valente to give her some money. He declined to do so, and she left the flat in a huff. He left the door unlocked for her before going to bed fully dressed. He awoke to find two men going through his trouser pockets. Raymond Alleyne, 22, and Anthony Perkins, 20, made off with over $2,500 in cash. When officers found Beth, 35, with Perkins and another man, she initially denied her involvement but later admitted that she had suggested the burglary.
California's Modesto Bee reports that 45-year-old Kelli Pratt wanted husband Arthur, 65, to have sex with her on 7 October. The feeble Arthur didn't feel up to it, so, according to police, she held him down and bit him repeatedly. Detective Sergeant Al Carter said: 'He was able to dial 911 [...]. We have a tape recording of him screaming while she was biting him.' When officers arrived, she tried to bite them as well, Carter said. Arthur died in hospital six days later, and Stanislaus County forensic pathologist Dr Jennifer Rulon said the bites are the likely cause of death.
The Arizona Republic reported that a 17-year-old male suffered burns to
over 15 per cent of his body while he and two other teenagers were huffing
butane fumes in a parked car. Mesa Fire Department spokesman Deputy Chief
Mike Dunn said it's unclear whether one of the boys who were trying to get
high lit a cigarette or flicked a lighter. The police believe the boys
were inhaling the fumes from a half-litre container of butane via a tube
for refilling cigarette lighters.
From now on, if you want to make Anna's News Clippings for such a feat,
you'll need to add something new to the mix.
When the undersheriff of San Juan County, New Mexico, leased a rental car, he discovered a computer disk inside. A member of his agency reviewed it and discovered that it provided access to downloaded child porn images. Investigators checked the car's rental history and contacted Ivan Darlo Vargas Pinto, 25, of Tampa, Florida. According to detectives, he admitted to downloading the images.
Investigators in Florida say 37-year-old Lonnie Shields climbed inside a small vent on the roof of the New City Mart at about 2am. on Thursday. He was discovered in the oven's exhaust vent about six hours later when some of the convenience store's employees arrived. Orlando fire chief Greg Hoggatt said: 'He was banged up and crunched up and uncomfortable' from his night in the pipe. Shields was treated at a nearby hospital and faces charges of burglary of a structure.
When police horse Bailey was helping officers control crowds at a fraternity party in Oroville, California, he stepped on 24-year-old Robert William Huff's foot. At least that's why Huff claims he punched the horse in the face. Butte County Superior Court Judge Stephen Benson sentenced Huff to 20 hours of community service and 24 hours in jail for assaulting a police horse. District attorney Mike Ramsey foresees the community service work including 'shoveling horse manure at the Chico police mounted unit's training grounds'.
Brooklyn's Juliann and Edward Tesoriero switched from oil to natural gas heating about 35 years ago, but the filling pipe was not removed from the home. Last Tuesday, a driver for Benit Fuel Oil misread the address on a bill and began pumping oil through the pipe into the Tesorieros' basement. The driver noticed the mistake after about a minute of pumping. The couple said they returned home to find 580 litres of oil in their basement, soaking carpeting, furniture, and pictures. The company estimates the amount of oil at closer to a third of that. Benit general manager Dennis Barlow said: 'We hired a company to restore the house.'
Julie Kay Russo, 32, asked a clerk at an S & S Superstop in Arkansas to cash a payroll cheque for her. The clerk noticed the spelling 'indapendent' in the company name on the cheque and became suspicious, according to Van Buren police corporal Rob Rogers. The clerk rang the bank named on the cheque, found out that the account number given was bogus, and took off after Russo when she fled. Arkansas State Police troopers pulled Russo over and found 30 forged cheques, with a total value of over $20,000, in her car.
When Linda Peatie died of an undisclosed illness at Cape Cod Hospital in Massachusetts, nurse Maureen Beckler left the room to fetch a doctor to pronounce her dead. Returning to the room, Beckler noticed Peatie's son, 37-year-old Robert S. Peatie, pouring the morphine from his mother's intravenous drip bag into a water bottle. Beckler said: 'He looked at me and said: "I just need a minute more."' He fled when she ordered him away from the IV stand, and police found him at a restaurant near the hospital. Hyannis police Detective Brian Guiney said Robert, who has a history of substance abuse, later admitted to pouring the morphine into the bottle and taking sips from it.
Parked at a petrol station in Orlando, Florida, sheriff's deputy Ed Johnson was in uniform when Michael Garibay parked directly behind him, walked up to his marked patrol car, and asked whether Johnson was 'straight'. Johnson replied in the affirmative, and Garibay responded: 'Do you know what that means? [...]. It means "Do you want to buy some cocaine?"' Johnson said he thought Garibay was joking and 'yes', according to arrest reports, and Garibay produced a plastic bag containing 'several pieces of flat white rocks substances [sic]'. He asked for cash. A field test confirmed that the material was the obvious, and Garibay was arrested.
A man in Canada's Yukon Territory has it all figured out. Cliff Hanna of Whitehorse has declared in a sworn affidavit that his name was placed on his birth certificate without his consent. This announcement comes after he was charged with failing to file income taxes for the last three years. The man who claims no name said debts assigned to James Clifford Hanna by the government are not his responsibility. He said it means nothing that he does on occasion respond to the name; after all, 'I respond to "Uncle" from my niece and nephews and "Meow" from my aunt's cats, but it's doubtful that any of these is my true name. Justice of the peace Garry Burgess was not convinced and has fined Hanna over CN$3,000.
The media in Kentucky report that Jacqueline Dotson of Letcher County veered into the median strip on the Mountain Parkway and over-corrected, rolling her truck over the guard rail. The vehicle flipped several times and came to rest upside down. Along with her daughter, Dotson was cut from the vehicle. A tourniquet was applied to the socket where her arm had been a few moments earlier. The arm was found near the scene of the accident, with mobile telephone still in hand.
A police officer in Texas stopped a car that had no licence plate light
and noticed a strong smell of marijuana in the air. Milford Police Chief
Carlos Phoenix said that the driver sped away when the officer returned to
his car to summon assistance. As several other law enforcement agencies
joined the chase, the driver tore open 17 to 19 bags and threw them out
the window. Phoenix said: 'There was marijuana flying everywhere.' When
the driver was taken into custody, he was 'literally covered in
marijuana'.
Officers found a rucksack, two duffel bags, and three or four
3.8-litre freezer bags on the highway. Several people heard via their police
scanners that a man was throwing marijuana from his car window. Anyone
arriving too late to collect some of the substance should check back in
springtime, as rather a lot of seeds blew away.
Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz said his office supplied a restaurant with 10 slogans about Brooklyn to insert into fortune cookies for distribution at a fund-raising event held to send poor children to summer camp. He said one of the event's 700 guests reported that the cookies did not contain phrases such as 'Brooklyn - it's like an everything bagel'. The guest, he said, shouted: 'Marty, did you order these cookies? Did you see what's inside them? I think you better get your butt down here!' Markowitz, who was without his eyeglasses, had some of the guests read the 'fortunes' to him. Markowitz said the 350 'triple X' cookies were surely 'meant for a raunchy bachelor party. They were not cutesy.' Most of the guests had left by the time the cookies were opened.
A six-year-old boy at Downey Elementary School in Brockton, Massachusetts, was suspended from school for three days for sexual harassment. School officials told his mother, Berthena Dorinvil, that he had placed two fingers inside a female classmate's waist band. The boy told her he touched her shirt after she touched him. Dorinvil said she doesn't know how to explain to her son what he did wrong.
'We've just got a tough time ahead of us right now,' said Assistant Police Chief Sean O'Nale of Lomoke, Arkansas. O'Nale is serving as interim police chief because Chief Jay Campbell has been accused of conspiring to make methamphetamine and frame someone for the operation. Prosecutor Lona McCastlain says Campbell's wife took two prisoners from jail to have sex with at ballparks, the chief's office, and a hotel. The chief apparently used prisoners only for such tasks as fixing an air conditioner and hanging Christmas lights. Among the other charges against the couple are that they stole antique jewellery from a home and pawned it. Also arrested, in a corruption probe, were this town of about 4300's mayor and two bail bondsmen.
Former strip-club waitress Kimberly Lynn Dasilva said she was tired of being mistreated by men and 'couldn't take it anymore' so sent condoms filled with a mixture of drain cleaner and petrol to her former employers, a television station, a radio station, and a motorcycle club. Another condom, sent to the Bridgewater State College admissions office, came with a note that said: 'Boom'. None of the condoms exploded, authorities said. Dasilva, a single mother of two, was arrested Friday after FBI agents and state police troopers found letters hidden in her bedroom's ceiling that allegedly linked her to the mailings.
A young woman stole 40 New Zealand dollars' worth of chicken from a
butcher's shop in Palmerston North. The shop's security cameras captured
her image, but no-one could figure out who she was. Shop-owner Wayne
Gerrand said that shoplifters are enough of an annoyance that he tried to come
up with a new approach. He posted her photo alongside the words: 'This
Week's Lucky Shopper'. Amy Adams, 17, and a friend entered the shop to
find out what Adams had won. When asked, she admitted to taking the
chicken. Some of it was recovered.
Gerrand said the plan wasn't that clever and that it 'does defy logic
that someone would actually respond to it'.
In December, 87-year-old Mae King of East St. Louis, Illinois, was the victim of a burglary and beating. She recently awoke to find someone removing her home's storm door. She decided to call the police, but the telephone line had been cut - just as in the previous robbery. The security bars on her door had been removed as well. She took the gun her daughter had given her after the first break-in and fired several shots through the door. She sat in her room until her daughter arrived in the morning with breakfast. Outside the door was the body of would-be burglar Larry D. Tillman. One of the several bullets that hit him went through a lung. King is now staying with family.
In 2000, Debra Schwarz was travelling around the country selling
wrought-iron Christmas ornaments with her husband when she received a
ticket in Oregon for failing to obey a traffic signal. Along with payment
of her $350 fine she enclosed human faeces. When Schwarz, now 46,
violated her probation for this offence, she was jailed, leaving her
82-year-old husband stranded. Police found him disoriented and sleeping
in a pickup truck. He died of a heart attack before her jail term ended,
and she now wishes to return to Texas to settle his estate. However, she
refuses to pay a fine that would allow her to get her driver's licence
back, and she says she can't take a bus, train, or aeroplane because of
her two dogs. So she has decided to walk home.
She spent a month building a one-metre-wide, two-metre-long cart that
she pulls along by a metal bar at her waist. On the back are flashlights
and a reflective triangle, along with 'CAUTION' in large black letters.
Also written on the cart are comments about those she believes have done
her wrong. These messages have not had a wide audience so far; in
response to motorists' complaints that they couldn't get round her, the
police escort her from local highways whenever she hits the road
The police and her attorney have convinced her for the moment that
walking home in winter is ill-advised.
Steven Coburn of Mill Valley, California, went to a shipping company to post a package, but either he forget to address it or the label fell off. Employees followed protocol by opening the package to see whether the address label had been sealed inside by accident. They did find a quarter of a kilo of marijuana within and contacted law enforcement, who returned the package to sender. The authorities went to the 48-year-old Coburn's home, where they found another .7 kilos of the drug.
In order to attend a hearing at Washington's Snohomish County Courthouse, one must pass through a metal detector and place metal objects in a basket for separate inspection. A 35-year-old Everett man took a bag from his pocket and placed it in the inspection basket. Courthouse marshal Mark San Diego thought the bag looked suspicious and took the man aside. A police officer's field test showed the bag to contain cocaine. After the man was booked into the county jail, deputy prosecutor John Adcock let him know that cocaine would not have set off the metal detector.
California's Orange County Weekly reports that Tamara Anne Moonier went
to a police station in Fullerton to report being abducted from a parking
lot by a group of men and then raped on videotape at an unknown residence
for over an hour at gunpoint. A manhunt commenced, and the 28-year-old
Moonier eventually identified all six of the 20-year-old men who'd had sex
with her. They voluntarily turned over the videotape. After watching it,
police detectives did not file charges.
The tape showed no force. It did feature Moonier complaining about the
lighting, cheering on some of the men, and chastising others for losing
their erections. Moonier said on tape: 'This better not fucking end up on
the Internet unless you're gonna give me some of the money!' and 'I just
like sex. I can't help it.' When police told Moonier, now Kerr, that they
had seen the tape, she did not recant. She has been indicted for filing
false police reports, lying under oath, and stealing funds from a
taxpayer-funded victim support programme in moving house after the
'gangbang'. She faces a maximum of 44 months in jail.
A non-identified employee at a Hess Mart petrol station in Melbourne, Florida, dropped her mobile telephone down a drain and reached down to retrieve it. She became stuck. About 20 firefighters were summoned to remove a 1.2-metre section of an outside wall so that they could gain access to the pipe and the woman. Four hours after dropping her telephone, she was free of the wall. The pipe was then removed from her arm at the local hospital.
Authorities were called to Rose Wright's Hayward, California, home after she allegedly forced her husband from the home at gunpoint. A SWAT team lobbed over three dozen canisters of tear gas into the house, but Wright still did not budge. She remained inside with three shotguns, an AK-47, and two handguns, among other weapons. Eight and a half hours after the standoff began, Wright made an obscene gesture at officers. Knowing that she therefore no longer had a weapon in hand, they stormed the building and collected her.
Reuters reports that a youth in Schwelm, Germany, tied himself to a fold-away bed with a rope and wire, ostensibly because he was bored. The bed then folded away, and he became trapped, hanging upside down. Neighbours heard the 16-year-old boy screaming for help, so they alerted the police. Police spokesman Dietmar Trust said: 'He was visibly embarrassed, but it was also a pretty amusing situation.'
According to a police report, Thor Jeffrey Steven Laufer, 43, turned himself in, explaining that he had stolen various items from construction sites in Mequon, Wisconsin, 'so that it would look like a typical burglary rather than someone just stealing doorknobs' to satisfy an obsession. Laufer had stolen dozens of doorknobs from the sites, as well as tools and materials. He has been sentenced to three years in prison and faces charges in connection with similar incidents in the town of Franklin.
Florida's Franklin Crow, 56, and 58-year-old room-mate Kenneth Matthews got into an argument over loo roll. There was no toilet paper in the house, and Crow blamed Matthews for this. Things then grew violent. Crow told the police later that Matthews produced a rifle and that he retaliated by beating Matthews to death with a sledgehammer and claw hammer. Matthews was beaten so badly that he had to be identified via his fingerprints.
Singapore's Straits Times claims that Chinese student Li Xiao Meng, 16, often grew excited while playing his guitar in his third-floor hostel room. This is how he died. A coroner's court said evidence 'points to the deceased unintentionally falling out of the window to his death when he was hyped up with exhilaration, jumping up and down on the bed placed against an open window while mimicking a rock guitarist'. The Hua Business School hostel's windows are normally locked, but students sometimes force them open in order to smoke without getting caught.
Officers in Columbus, Indiana, pulled over a motorist who was driving erratically. He identified himself as Robert Carmer. Officers thought this was odd, given the tattoo of 'Cecil' on the back of the man's neck. It turned out that the man was 25-year-old Cecil S. Carmer, who had a brother named Robert. In addition to being charged with providing false information, Cecil was found to have been driving under a suspended licence and carrying equipment and ingredients for methamphetamine production in his car.
Hove Crown Court was told that Ryan Jones and Michael Davids returned to
their flat after drinking, then came to blows when Davids mentioned the
other man's ex-lover. When the police arrived, a blood-covered Jones,
half-naked and still intoxicated, allegedly hefted a 1.2-metre didgeridoo
and began shouting at the officers. He swung the instrument at windows,
which bowed slightly but did not break. Police used CS gas in an attempt
to disarm him, but the 23-year-old Jones did not drop the didgeridoo until
he was sprayed a second time. He has been ordered to complete a 12-month
community order, do 180 hours of unpaid labour, and pay prosecution costs.
Afterwards Jones said: 'The police took the didgeridoo away. I had only
just learned how to play it.'
A man and woman entered a convenience store in Pittsburgh and asked a
clerk to microwave something. According to police, the man claimed it was
a life-or-death situation. He wrapped an object in kitchen roll, and the
clerk microwaved it for 20 seconds. When returning the item to the man,
the clerk saw that it appeared to be a severed penis.
Following news reports on the incident, the female in the pair rang the
police with an explanation, according to McKeesport police chief Joseph
Pero. She said she was applying for a job and needed to pass a drug test
so had had the man supply his own urine, which she'd needed to warm to
body temperature. Police said it wasn't clear why the woman chose a
prosthetic penis-like device for storing the urine. Charges are possible.
In another urine-soaked story, Ohio's 54-year-old Alan Patton was arrested while leaving a cinema last week, after a man told an employee that Patton was staring at his son in the gents' toilets. Patton explained to the police in Gahanna that he waits for a boy to arrive in the loo, then shuts off the water to the child-level urinal, places a cup in the bottom, retrieves the cup after the boy leaves, and drinks the contents. He said he has been drinking adolescent boys' urine since he was seven. Patton allegedly said the act makes him sick but is almost spiritual to him and 'makes me closer to them - like I'm drinking their youth'. Detective Ron Fithen said: 'Listening to him describe it, it's like listening to a crack or cocaine addict. He's addicted to children's urine.'
Hey!
Follow the link for earlier
clippings.
Want later clippings? Take a look at the
March bunch.
Go to the Clippings index page
© 2006 Anna Shefl