Cody Wilkins noticed that his mobile phone needed to charge, so he
plugged it in. The problem, for him, is that he left without it,
jumping out of a window when one of the people whose home he'd been
burgling returned to the building.
The police found the phone, which easily led to the 25-year-old
Wilkins. He has been charged in connection with several burglaries.
In another botched burglary, a man broke into a home in the Japanese
city of Kawanishi but bumped into the person who lived there.
Mid-scuffle, the burglar asked the man to let him go in exchange
for money. Before any such deal could be agreed upon, the intruder
found a way to escape. A few minutes later, reports Mainichi
Shimbun, the resident saw the intruder on a nearby street and asked:
'Didn't you tell me you would pay me?' The man handed the resident
the equivalent of about 800 euros from his wallet and ran off.
The resident supplied the man's description to the police anyway.
The police took custody of the money, which will be returned to the
resident if the suspect isn't found.
According to the Italian press, Calogero Lo Coco recently visited his
former home near Agrigent, Italy, where ex-wife Rosa Nicosia now lived
with her boyfriend, and they killed him. The manner of the killing
could have come straight out of a murder mystery: the couple apparently
suffocated him with butter shoved down his throat, which later
melted.
The couple told authorities that he had arrived intoxicated,
attacked them, been tied up, and then suddenly died. However, traces
of melted butter or margarine were found in the dead man's airways
in a post-mortem examination.
In Idaho in 2009, someone began placing substances such as corn syrup and
ketchup in the Ada County Community Library's book drop. Recently,
after more than 10 such incidents, officers keeping an eye on the
scene caught the culprit: 75-year-old Joy Cassidy. Clutching an open
jar of mayonnaise, she had little choice but to plead guilty to more
than $1,000 of malicious injury to property.
Cassidy, sentenced to a month in jail and told to stay away from
local libraries from two years, had been acting in response to
arguments she'd had with library patrons and staff.
Two secondary schools in Dignes les Bains, France, hired a man from
Northern Ireland to teach German. All seemed to be going well until,
about a month later, school officials became suspicious of his
ramblimgs - and the fact that, for example, he would sometimes wear
gloves in order not to leave fingerprints - and they looked into his
past.
Their new hire was found to be Lewis Alexander Mawhinney, an escapee
from lifetime commitment to a psychiatric ward. The 26-year-old
Mawhinney had been labelled a dangerous schizophrenic after he'd
stabbed a call centre colleague in the neck, School officials
dismissed him.
The gloves were because Mawhinney, now residing at a hospital in
France, believed himself to belong to MI5.
Prosecutors have charged Tihomir Petrov with two counts of urination
in a public place. The public place was the office door of a fellow
mathematics professor at California State University at Northridge.
Investigators say that the urination was motivated by a dispute
between the two teachers.
Petrov wouldn't have been caught if he'd committed the offence only
once. However, officials at the university had set up a surveillance
camera after the first incident.
Responding to an anonymous tip of an illegal cockfight, California police arrived at the scene to find five dead roosters. Also a victim of the cockfight was Jose Luis Ochoa, 35, who had been stabbed in the right calf by a rooster with knives strapped to its limbs. Ochoa, who sought medical attention only after two hours had passed, died in hospital, presumably as a result of blood loss.
A US court of appeal has upheld a ruling that bans the role-playing game
Dungeons & Dragons from Wisconsin's Waupun Correctional Institution.
The ban came after an anonymous note warned prison officials that
inmate Kevin Singer, who had been a fan of the game since childhood,
and three other inmates were trying to gain recruits for their
'gang' by showing others their D&D publications. All fantasy games
were therefore banned and Singer's handwritten materials were
confiscated. Games such as Risk and chess remained unfettered.
After that, Singer filed a civil rights complaint. In view of
expert testimony, prison officials conceded that D&D has not led
to gang behaviour in the past. However, the court deemed rational the
prison officials' belief that the game might do so and/or undermine
security. This was judged to be the key issue too in the upholding of
the ban.
Didier Jambart is taking pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline to court,
charging that its drug for Parkinson's disease has side effects that
weren't mentioned with the product when he'd used it: he states that
Requip made him addicted to risky behaviours: gambling and gay sex.
The 51-year-old Jambart states that the behaviours stopped when,
after about two years, he ceased taking the drug. But by that
point, Jambart, a married father of two, had already lost the family's
savings to online gambling, been raped as a result of risky sexual
behaviours, and been demoted from his defence ministry position.
He is seeking 450,000 euros in damages, from Glaxo and his
neurologist.
Portland, Oregon, Fire and Rescue spokesman Paul Corah said that someone rang to report a fire and then hung up on the dispatcher. The fire, which caused $30,000 in damage was put out, and the apparent cause was pinned down: tenants using a hole in the floor as an ashtray. 'That's not careless smoking; that's stupid smoking' was Corah's summary.
By contrast, Connecticut's Robert Michelson wanted to be careful. He
rang the emergency services to ask a dispatcher how much trouble he
could find himself in if growing just one marijuana plant. The
dispatcher told him that he could be arrested for growing the drug.
Michelson thanked the dispatcher for the information and hung up.
A short while later, officers paid a visit to the 21-year-old
Michelson's home, where they found a small amount of marijuana and
drug paraphernalia.
When a UK immigration officer was put forward for a promotion that required higher security clearance, his supervisors noticed that his wife was on a terrorist watch list. Questioned about this, he admitted to having added her to the database himself after she'd left the country to visit family in Pakistan. For the last three years, she has been unable to return to the UK. According to UK media, the Home Office have confirmed that the unnamed officer has been relieved of his job as a result of his gross misconduct.
Police in Missouri came upon Darion O. Page, 18, and two minors sitting in a vehicle stuck in a snowdrift. With them in the vehicle were credit cards and other belongings that had been stolen from motorists who had become stuck in the snow earlier. The teenagers, who face charges of robbery and armed criminal action, pretty much all blame each other for the robberies.
Russian news agency Novy Region reports that a 73-year-old woman died
last year in Yekaterinburg and her 69-year-old sister had a hard time
facing this. The younger sister, who reportedly has a record of
unsound mental health, preserved her sister's body in petrol in her
flat and has tried various tricks to revive it. Her latest attempt
was worthy of Victor Frankenstein, and perhaps inspired by the same:
She connected her sister to the mains with two wires, one attached to
the corpse's neck and the other to a hand.
The result was a fire that left the younger woman in hospital with
burns and smoke inhalation issues and left the older woman still dead.
Recently uncovered documents describe the case of a Libyan man sent to
Italy for training as a 'frogman'. The man, assumed to be a member of
the Libyan government, took part in the classroom portion of the
underwater explosives detection and demolition course but then balked
when it was time to enter the swimming pool for the practical training.
A report stated: 'The instructor walked up to the student, put his
mask on, shoved the regulator in his mouth and pushed him into the
pool. The Libyan student sank like a stone, spit [sic] out his
regulator and swallowed a great deal of water.' The man was
retrieved, and the water was pumped out of his lungs.
It emerged that the man was the cousin of an official responsible
for selecting participants in the course. He had allegedly liked the
idea of a holiday in Rome.
A complaint to the Libyan government from Italian interior minister
Roberto Maroni about the non-swimmer received the response that the
Italian government should ensure that candidates for its training
programmes ae properly qualified, and that the Italians should have
taught the man how to swim.
Speaking for the fire and rescue service of Lake Dillon, Colorado,
Steve Lipsher reports that workers at the Summit County landfill had
problems starting their vehicles in the recent cold snap and 'had a
unique adaptation for handling it'. They decided to warm the oil pan
of a semi-articulated tractor and placed a pan of burning charcoal
underneath. They ended up doing more than heat the engine: the
tractor caught fire.
No-one was injured, but two tractors were damaged and seven
firefighters had an hour's work to do.
Finally, Louisiana's The Courier reports on domestic strife. According to Jerry Voisin, 51, his girlfriend had been drinking when she wanted to cool a mixed drink in the freezer but found no space for it. The girlfriend, 47-year-old Edith Tassin, allegedly created space in the freezer by removing a frozen beefsteak. She is accused of aggravated battery for solving the problem of where to put the steak by throwing it at Voisin, hitting him in the side of the face. He was bleeding when officers arrived.
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© 2011 Anna Shefl