The Guardian Australia reports that someone in Perth summoned authorities to a neighbour's home after hearing a toddler there screaming and someone shouting things like 'Why don't you die?' repeatedly. The Wanneroo police later reported that their forces converging on the scene found a man who had been excitedly trying to kill a spider. He and his family apologised for the inconvenience.
Traffic police in Ningbo, China, have a system that is intended to deter potential jaywalkers
by shaming offenders, whose faces are captured by cameras and displayed on large public
screens. The shame was directed back at them recently when the system detected and spread
pictures of Dong Mingchu, the president of China's largest manufacturer of air-conditioning
systems. The problem was that Dong had not been crossing the street when the light was red
for pedestrians; her photo had been legally making its way down the street in an advert on
the side of a bus.
The traffic police, who had earlier bragged about the system having detected more than
7,800 instances of jaywalking, announced that technicians have now 'completely upgraded the
system to reduce the false recognition rate'.
The report on why California's Brian David Boyack, 43, was thrown in jail explains that he
and his family, whom he was visiting in Utah, 'were out in the hot tub having a good time
when a conversation began regarding big corporations and essentially conspiracy theories'.
When Boyack began collecting his belongings to leave, the homeowner locked him out of the
house, explaining that Boyack was not fit to drive. The door reopened once Boyack started
whacking patio furniture against the side of the building. At this point, Boyack bit a large
chunk from the top of the man's ear, then drove away.
He later turned himself in, with the explanation that 'I've done something horrible but I
don't want to answer questions'. He nonetheless faces questions related to mayhem, criminal
mischief, intoxication, and domestic violence in the presence of children.
Barbara Davis, 56, was doing some New Year's Day cleaning in her Duncan, South Carolina, home
when her husband, in the heat of an argument, dared her to throw the bleach into his eyes.
So she did.
She later told the police that she'd complied on account of her fear that he intended to
attack her. He later told the police that he had been rendered blind, though he refused
medical treatment. Davis has been charged with second-degree domestic violence, and there
are now bleach stains on the sofa for her to deal with.
Polyana Viana was waiting for an unofficial taxi in Rio de Janeiro when the man next to her asked what time it was. As she referred to her phone to answer him, he demanded the device and indicated that he was armed. Viana said that, with the rationale 'if it's a gun, he won't have time to draw it', she stood, then punched and kicked him. Putting her Ultimate Fighting Championship experience to use, Viana, 27, placed him in a choke hold and sat him down to wait for the police. The man, a recently released criminal whose weapon turned out to be a cardboard cutout of a gun, did not argue, Viana said - 'he was scared I was going to beat him up more'. After the incident, he was checked over in hospital, and Viana reported that her hands hurt.
A woman in Oklahoma, in contrast, might have been better off not admitting to throwing a
punch or two. When Cannon Harrison entered into online conversation with a woman he'd met
via the dating application Bumble, one of the first things she did was brag about having
'spotlighted' a deer and punched it, before shooting it dead. Cannon, whose title is
Department of Wildlife Conservation Game Warden, figured that she must have been joking about
the illegal acts and known about his job, so he asked whether she had used a crossbow, since
rifle-hunting season was over. She provided photos of the slain animal in response.
He traced her details via social media, and game wardens tracked her down the next day.
She and her hunting partner have been fined $2,400 in total.
It seems that two girls in Magnolia, Mississippi, did not appreciate their mother
confiscating their mobile phones. This explains why the mother, 32-year-old Erica Hall, soon
found a bullet hole in her abdomen and a knife in her back. While she was staggering
outside, the girls, ages 12 and 14, went to a neighbour's house and requested a ride to
another town. They explained that their grandmother had just passed away.
The sisters' aunt, Robin Coney, soon arrived and confronted the girls. She later said that
at the scene 'they were like "Tee Tee we didn't do this", and I was like "OK, if y'all didn't
do it, where were y'all when the people that was doing it did it?"'. Their case was not aided
by Pike County authorities' report that the girls had attempted to run over Hall with the
family car a few days earlier. The older daughter, Amariyona Hall, has been jailed on a
murder charge, and the younger is being treated as a juvenile.
Deanna Seltzer is a slightly older girl who was displeased with a parental decision. This
28-year-old Lake Worth, Florida, woman allegedly went into a violent rage when her parents
said 'no' to her pleas for a meal at Outback Steakhouse. She is accused of directing a
series of punches at her mother, then attacking her father when he intervened. Her arrest
report also mentions her flipping over a glass-topped table and other furniture and then
removing a large decorative knife from the wall and slashing it near her father while
screaming death threats.
According to the arrest report, he was able to wrest the knife from her grasp before
ringing the emergency services. Seltzer's future holds charges of aggravated assault and
battery of an elderly person, a mental-health evaluation, and perhaps no visit to the
steakhouse.
Someone wanted to ruin a birthday party that a primary-school principal was hosting for her
daughter at a park in Sarasota, Florida. The chosen method was spreading human faeces on the
tables and barbecue grills just before the party. The culprit was Heather Carpenter, not a
student at Phillippi Shores Elementary but a 42-year-old substitute teacher with a well-known
grievance over a 'professional issue'. She confessed to the act but is pleading not guilty to
criminal mischief and property damage.
Seven porous tables and two grills were replaced, and Carpenter is not allowed to teach
while there is an ongoing criminal investigation.
While being strip-searched during his admission to Florida's Pinellas County Jail, 40-year-old Wesley Scott removed three syringes from his rectum and handed them to an officer. Scott, who at the time of his arrest on a drugs-related warrant, had assured the officer patting him down that there was no contraband concealed on or within his person, has therefore been charged with introducing illegal items into a correctional facility, along with various drugs offences. He responded to the charges by explaining that the syringes were not his.
Marissa Tietsort, 28, is a Wisconsin child-minder who decided to keep her young charges'
mother from discovering that one of them had died under her care. Allegedly, Tietsort
dressed the relevant infant in winter clothes and took the corpse and other children to
McDonald's before the mother collected her kids. Upon realising that the two-month-old
baby wasn't merely sleeping, the mother contacted the authorities. An autopsy revealed that
he had died of multiple-impact blunt-force trauma to the head.
The next day, Tietsort was found at a hotel with her boyfriend and was arrested - on a
child-abuse charge from a few months back: the contention was that she had injured an
11-month-old girl's face, while Tietsort maintained that the girl had toppled from a sofa.
No charges were filed in connection with an earlier case in which a baby suffered skull
fractures that Tietsort claimed came from children fighting over a bottle.
She is being charged with intentional homicide for the latest incident, and a judge has
released her on a $500,000 cash bond on condition that she not have contact with children.
Tietsort is now pregnant with her sixth child.
Prosecutors in New York are charging Renee Burke, 40, with putting antifreeze in assorted
beverages in her estranged husband's flat on three separate occasions. The motive cited for
this is a desire to end a custody battle via his death. The older of the two children at the
centre of the custody battle is an eight-year-old girl, whom surveillance-camera footage
reportedly shows helping open a wine bottle during one of the poisoning attempts. The other
child is a four-year-old boy who told his child-minder that a child's bottle in the home
contained something for 'Daddy's drink'.
Burke's husband allegedly noticed a foul taste each time he drank an antifreeze-laced
beverage so spat it out. His primary custody of the children might well continue, while
Burke could spend up to 25 years in prison.
Mercedes Walker visited a block of flats in Memphis, Tennessee, with a yellow card attached
to a glue trap for mice. She inserted this into the slot in the complex's after-hours
deposit box and went fishing for rent cheques. Just as she gave up, the car waiting for her
drove off. This left her on her own, apart from the security guard who was watching.
The guard summoned the police, who arrested Walker on charges of both attempted and
successful burglary: her fishing expedition the previous night had netted her a money order
for $294.
The police in Layton, Utah, have urged members of the public not to accept an online 'challenge' associated with the film Bird Box. This follows an incident in which a teenager drove into oncoming traffic while her hat was pulled over her eyes. Police Lieutenant Travis Lyman said that he never thought he'd have to warn people not to drive while blindfolded. Netflix, the film's producer, had issued a similar warning a few days before the Utah incident.
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