Responding to a woman's reports of an intruder in her home, the Dutch
police found her daughter's crib overflowing with a drunken
18-year-old man clad only in his underwear. The police officers
characterised the disoriented young man as non-remorseful and
as concerned primarily about his mobile phone.
Depositing him in a squad car, they delivered him to his father's
care, finding that the events left equally 'little impression on' the
older man.
Hearing shouts from a deer-hunting platform near Bückeburg, Germany,
a cyclist and hunter contacted the police, who identified the source as
a securely bound 51-year-old man who had begun a sex game with a woman
he'd met online. The fully-clothed (plus head-worn hosiery) man
explained that, after she'd fled precipitously upon receiving a phone
call, he discovered that her bondage skills were sufficiently advanced
that he couldn't reach the box-cutters he kept on his person 'for such
situations'.
Although the man refused to identify her, the police have opened an
investigation for deprivation of liberty and failure to render
assistance.
Upon learning that the final Hot Pocket toaster snack had been removed from the freezer and eaten, Kentucky's 64-year-old Clifton Williams began hurling building tiles at his roommate. According to court documents, Williams followed up by fetching a handgun and shooting the other man 'in the ass while he was trying to leave' the shared Louisville, Kentucky, home. Williams faces charges of assault.
Somewhat larger-scale unexpected eating occurred in China's Jilin
province, where a Mr Liu, arriving for a match-maker-arranged blind
date at a restaurant frequented also by his date, a Ms Zhang, found
that she had 23 relatives in tow. At the end of the meal, a panicked
Liu fled when handed the bill for all 25 people's food, cigarettes,
and alcohol. While Zhang settled up, she contacted Liu to insist that
he cover half of the total. His counter-offer of one fifth earned him
a lawsuit from the Zhang family and comments that he had failed their
generosity test.
When the case was eventually resolved, the court decided that he
need only pay a third of what he'd offered - i.e., for what he and
Zhang had eaten.
Having apparently suffered a fatal stroke, Ecuador's Bella
Montoya was declared dead by a hospital doctor in Babahoyo
and sent to a funeral parlour. However, upon opening the coffin five
hours later for a pre-burial change of clothes, her family heard her
take a ragged breath. Some guests at the wake later reported having
heard knocking from within the casket.
Montoya's son Gilbert Balberán reported that emergency responders
took the 76-year-old woman back to the hospital where she'd been
declared dead. After seven days in intensive care there, she died
'for real', however.
In other morbid news, former Harvard Medical School morgue manager
Cedric Lodge, 55, is accused of stealing dissected portions of
donated cadavers and taking them to his home. There, he and his wife
sold these brains, bones, and other bits to such outfits as the shop
Kat's Creepy Creations and a speciality leather-maker's over a span of
five years, according to a federal indictment.
Some of the buyers face conspiracy charges: Lodge allegedly admitted
them to the morgue so that they could choose from among the dissected
faces and other remains available. Among the evidence are payment
memos such as 'head number 7' and 'braiiiiiins'.
Not long after someone scaled the fences of a swimming hall in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and broke into its basement pump room via a ventilation shaft, emergency responders were alerted to a suspicious substance on three slides at the town's Bliss Park Playground. At about the same time, reports began arriving of children receiving blisters and burn-like injuries at the playground and nearby residential properties. The fire department later stated that 'a great deal of effort was employed to enter this space' and steal hydrochloric acid from it. Those responsible remain at large.
Amid mug-shot fever, now might be an appropriate time for sharing the
wisdom of John Amann, who found out at his local bank that the
2,000-plus US bucks' worth of Trump Bucks and related items he'd
purchased have no monetary value and might not even be endorsed by the
former President. Amann, a self-professed business adviser, tweeted
that those purchasing 'TRB VOUCHERS, DJT GOLDEN CHECKS, DJT DIAMOND
CHECKS, TRB GOLDEN CHECKS [...] GOT SCAMMED'. Perhaps he merely needs
to wait until 2024 before they become legal tender, however.
Bank of America spokesman Bill Halldin confirmed that multiple
customers have attempted to exchange these items for cash.
A Seminole County, Florida, sheriff's officer had to drive at twice
the posted speed limit to pull over Alexander Shaouni, an Orlando
police officer who offered the explanation 'I am going in to work, my
man'. On body-camera video, Shaouni gestures to his police uniform
and refuses to provide identification documents, before heading back
to his patrol car and driving off again.
His squad-car number, badge code, and name tag, left little doubt as
to Shaouni's identity, and has been relieved of duty while awaiting
charges for such offences as reckless driving and resisting an officer.
Che Garibaldi, the main owner of two Taqueria Garibaldi locations in
northern California, is accused of hiring someone to pose as a priest
for purposes of extracting employee confessions to being late for
work, stealing money, having 'bad intentions', etc. The US Department
of Labor ordered the owners to pay $70,000 in back wages and the same
amount in damages (to 35 employees), alongside civil penalties.
Among the three owners' sins were denial of overtime pay, threats of
'immigration consequences', and dipping into the tip pool.
The department has also addressed complaints by car-repair shop
worker Andreas Flaten, who'd been paid in 91,500 oily pennies dumped
outside his home. It brought civil suit against Miles Walker, the
owner of FA OK Walker Autoworks, for failing to give nine workers
overtime pay and for retaliating against Flaten. A federal judge
has ordered the Peachtree City, Georgia, company to pay out $39,934
accordingly. That's quite a few one-cent pieces.
Walker's attorney stresses that the conflict reflects not the
owner's 'true character as a businessman' but that 'emotionally
charged decisions can come back and bite you in the rear end'.
Indiana's Deonta Jermaine Johnson, 27, and Shatia Tiara Welch, 24, are
no longer the parents of a five- and a one-year-old boy, thanks to a
handgun found by the elder boy in their flat. At the time of his
death from a shot to the head, 16-month-old Isiah [sic] had marijuana
in his blood. Further complicating the charge sheet is the fact that
his brother tested positive for cocaine.
Although the parents removed some drugs from the flat after another
resident alerted the authorities to a shooting on the premises, nearly
100 fentanyl pills, marijuana, etc. remained there for officers to
discover.
Another one-year-old child now freed of earthly cares is Māhina, a New Zealand girl whose parents tethered her above decks on the family yacht, moored in Fiji, before heading below to cook supper. When Mark and Kiri Toki returned from the galley after 'a few moments', their daughter was nowhere to be seen. The 13-month-old girl was eventually found floating in the waters below. According to a fund-raiser page set up by the family, Māhina had managed to 'work free' of the rope-and-life-vest combo that should have kept her safe.
In contrast, the death of one-year-old Ra'Miyah Worthington was less directly attributable to the parents' actions, though one could question the wisdom of leaving one's daughter in the custody of an outfit that uses the spelling 'Kidz of the Future Childcare'. There were nine children in the van driven to that Omaha, Nebraska, child-care centre by 62-year-old Ryan Williams, and only eight disembarked, amid distractions caused by a boy Williams described as 'not wanting to get out of the van and go inside'. Ra'Miyah was found in the vehicle six hours later with an elevated body temperature, and Williams could be found guilty of child abuse by neglect resulting in death.
The six-year-old victim in our next item is a Chihuahua named Sugar, and the culprit was a licensed pet-groomer who had passed himself off as a licensed veterinarian able to help deliver her puppies at the pet-owners' home. After south-east Florida's Osvaldo Sanchez, 61, performed a cesarean section on Sugar, he handed over a stillborn puppy and had Sugar's owners hand over $600. A week later, Sugar succumbed to an infection possibly caused by the improper suturing of the incision. Legal proceedings have commenced.
Barnham police officers responding to theft reports at 2:15am found the stolen item - a crane liberated from a builders' yard - being driven through a Co-op wall by Alfie Smith, a 43-year-old Ashford man who'd set his sights on a cash machine. While the incident wasn't particularly protracted for our miscreant, who did not make it far on foot, the same could not be said for the managers of the Southern Rail depot, which shares the building, or for a postbox that had been minding its own business.
There are various concepts that teenaged mums might not fully grasp.
We can add one to that list, at least in the case of 18-year-old
Jazmin Paez: RentAHitman.com is not the best venue for soliciting an
assassin's services. According to that parodic site's operator,
Robert Innes, this Florida woman's request for liquidation of her
three-year-old son raised red flags for how specific and urgent it
was.
After she'd apparently offered $3,000 for the hit and submitted
photos of the boy and of where he'd be, the authorities checked out
the originating IP address, spoke with Paez's grandmother, and
deposited the boy with alternative members of the family. According
to Innes, however, that was not before the Miami-Dade police
threatened to send him a cease-and-desist letter for his persistence.
I will let Brianna Kingsley, 40, explain the next item: ex-partner
William Wojciechowski 'retains possession of my surgically extracted
testicles, preserved in [a] Mason jar, kept in [the] fridge next to
the eggs'. Kingsley's claim filed with the Pontiac, Michigan, court
system demands 'immediate return of my human remains specimen and
damages of $6,500' (the maximal 'small claim') from the 37-year-old
man.
Wojciechowski, meanwhile, states that Kingsley 'took everything she
wanted' when the pair broke up, and he cites the filing as evidence of
persistent harassment and intimidation over the eight months since.
What could possibly go wrong for a 74-year-old man working alone at a
warehouse with shelves stretching 10 metres above ground level? When
checking on the work of a cheese-rotating robot at his 25,000-wheel
Grano Padano facility in Romano di Lombardia, Italy, hapless
cheese-factory owner Giacomo Chiapparini had only moments to muse on
this after a shelf's sudden collapse created a domino effect.
Fire-fighter Antonio Dusi later explained that rescuers, summoned by
someone who had heard thousands of wheels falling, worked all night to
move the cheeses and shelves manually. After 12 hours, the 20
fire-fighters from nearby cities found Chiapparini's crushed body.
In 2021, a long-time customer of Canadian farm-owner Chris Achter sent him a photograph of a flax-purchase contract and received a thumbs-up emoji in response. But no flax. A court case followed, in which Achter claimed that the image denoted only receipt of the contract, not acceptance of its terms. Ordering Achter to pay the equivalent of 62,000 euros in damages, Saskatchewan judge T.J. Keene stated that he was 'satisfied on the balance of probabilities that Chris okayed or approved the contract just like he had done before' except this time using emoji to satisfy the signature requirement.
For nearly a year, British Columbia's Rajnish Dhawan has been
complaining to Chilliwack city officials about noise from the three
pickleball courts erected about six metres from his property. Listing
a catalogue of stress-related medical complaints related to the
pickleball craze, the 52-year-old Dhawan explained that he and his
wife decided to follow Gandhi's example and go on a hunger strike
until the noise situation improves.
It seems that neither the city's new black tarpaulin and 'no
pickleball after dusk' rules nor the couple's banner reading 'DAILY
HUNGER STRIKE [only fruit, cereal, sharbat, nuts, etc. during daylight
hours] AGAINST HARASSMENT AND DISCRIMINATION BY CITY OF CHILLIWACK'
have had the desired effect.
A woman in Pinellas County, Florida, really wanted to catch a flight, so she scaled a fence to a Coast Guard station, where she stole a tricycle and rode it to the ramp area behind the St. Petersburg airport in hopes of boarding a commercial flight to Argentina. Spotted on the taxiway by airport personnel who'd been contacted by surveillance-feed monitors, she abandoned the stolen vehicle and unsuccessfully attempted to elude them. The woman, whose name has not been released, faces various charges. It is unclear whether alcohol or Scientology was involved.
Next, we have another Floridian to thank, 35-year-old Nichole A.
Maks, of Daytona Beach. The landlord of a 79-year-old multiple-stab
victim found dead in a burning building reported that Maks was the
other tenant. Near the body were Maks's mobile phone, the victim's
own phone, and a bloodied knife. And near a neighbouring restaurant
was a barefoot, bloodied Maks. While Maks was happy to drop a knife
and hammer at officers' feet when confronted there, she later insisted that
she hadn't known the victim and had been living on the streets for
years.
Under further questioning, though, she stated that she did know him
but hadn't seen him on the day of the murder and that she did live in
the building but had gone upstairs only to 'feed her spiders'. On the
same occasion, she tried to scrub herself clean with Mountain Dew,
thereby earning a charge of tampering with evidence.
Florida brings us one more Clippings item. This one involves Donnie
Adams, a 52-year-old man who visited the emergency facilities of a St.
Petersburg hospital for a tetanus shot and antibiotics, then returned
three days later - flesh-eating bacteria had left him barely able to
walk. To thwart them, surgeon Fritz Brink had to remove roughly 70%
of the tissue from the front of the thigh, then conduct follow-up
surgery after some intensive-care time.
The interesting part here is the cause: doctors explained that Adams
had been bitten by a relative when intervening in a family altercation
two days before his initial hospital visit. Adams reports that the two
family members who had been feuding 'are very sorrowful'.
In somewhat related news, frontal-lobe surgery on a woman at Canberra
Hospital revealed the cause of the diarrhoea, night sweats, and other
symptoms she'd begun reporting 1.5 years earlier. Describing the case
for the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, Dr Sanjaya Senanayake
recounted that all medics in attendance 'got the shock of their life'
when the abnormality raised into the air by the surgeon's forceps
'turned out to be a wriggling, live 8cm light red worm'. This
Ophidascaris robertsi roundworm, representing the first extraction
of a live worm from a human brain, is thought to have come from
parasite-infested Warrigal greens the patient had harvested near her
home for cooking.
The prime minister of Iraq has ordered an inquiry into how a bear
proved able to escape from its crate in the cargo hold of an Iraqi
Airlines plane that was preparing to depart for Baghdad from Dubai
International Airport. Passengers were asked to step off the aircraft
while the bear was dealt with. Approximately an hour later, the black
bear had been sedated and bustled through the open cargo-bay door.
One element of the investigation involves the airline changing its
story: the bear was being flown from Dubai to Baghdad, not the other
way round.
In other travel-related animal news, Customs agents at China's Futian
Port thought it prudent to examine the belongings of a nervous-looking
man arriving in Shenzhen from Hong Kong. They were particularly
interested in the contents of his pockets, which he'd kept furtively
checking. Each of the 14 socks and stockings in his pocketses
contained a live snake, which the border agents emptied one by one into
plastic containers. The herp-smuggler is likely to face charges at
least in relation to his three bull-python passengers.
Security guards making their rounds before the Eiffel Tower's 9am opening time found two US tourists asleep in a normally off-limits area between the second and third level. A special fire crew were sent to rescue the men, who Paris prosecutors say 'appear to have got stuck because of how drunk they were' on the previous evening. The operator of the tower, SETE, plan to sue the pair, partly for loss of revenue related to the delayed opening required - though bomb threats too had cut into the day's takings.
Finland's YLE reports on a Pedersöre man who reported a local
acquaintance to the authorities for having distributed 12 kilos of
dynamite between two cars he owned. Tony Rauma, with the Ostrobothnia
Police, later explained that this acquaintance 'had called the owner
of the cars to say that he had taken dynamite to the cars for storage'
as a joke. It appears that the car-owner wasn't amused.
Neither were the people who had to be evacuated from nearby
buildings while the explosives and accompanying detonators were
removed from the vehicles.
Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten recounts a 20-something man's attempt
to 'embrace' Geneva's Jet d'Eau fountain by breaching the security
perimeter and pressing his face to the nozzle, which reportedly expels
500 litres of water per second into Lake Geneva. This action sent the
man flying backward in reaction.
Approaching again, our interloper threw his arms out around
the torrent. This time, he was sent into the air and landed on the
cement nearby before throwing himself into the lake. He was collected
by police officers alerted by bystanders, then was carted off by
ambulance.
Swiss electricity company SIG, operator of the fountain, announced
plans to file a complaint against the man for trespassing.
Recycling bins aren't always available where most useful; however, those in Huron, Ohio, worked well enough to catch the creature that had been scuttling about above a bank drive-through at night while alarm-response officers looked on. That creature was 27-year-old Tristan Heidl, who dropped from the ceiling shortly after a rucksack containing construction tools hit the ground. Heidl was swiftly taken into custody and charged with safe-cracking and various other bank-robbery-related crimes.
Want more?
Follow the link for an earlier
bundle of Anna's News Clippings.
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September pile.
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