Thanks to Jack for our first story, from his neck of the woods. A
woman in Lexington County, South Carolina, decided to carry a bottle
of various suspicious-looking pills in her handbag while paying her
first check-in visit to her parole officer. This did not escape the
attention of the officer, who then spotted drugs in her car.
A search warrant was soon issued. Sure enough, Tina Catherine Dent,
54, whose probation was for a drugs violation, had what the sheriff's
office later described as 'a car full of drugs' - amphetamine,
cocaine, crack, meth, and 'other unidentified pills' - along with
materials used to package them for sale. She faces a bevy of charges.
Canada's Tony Sawicz rang the emergency services when he noticed smoke
pouring from the roof of a Winnipeg burger restaurant. The 18 fire
crews converging on the blazing A&W found the smoke so thick that they
were unable to enter; however, people kept joining the queue at the
drive-through window, which employees had long since abandoned.
Accumulated cooking grease and low outdoor temperatures hampered
fire-fighting efforts, and the building was ultimately a total loss.
However, the franchise-owner hopes to reopen by the end of the year.
Better start queueing up now.
The Houston Police Department's Jason Alderete described receiving a
phone call from a concerned member of the public who had found a tiger
indoors. Further questioning revealed that the caller had entered an
apparently abandoned house to smoke marijuana. Officers arriving
on the scene found not a hallucinating pot-head but a large,
neglected-seeming wildcat in a cramped cage secured with a screwdriver
and nylon strap.
Attempts to find out who left the tiger there, alongside some
packages of meat, are ongoing. Meanwhile, the tiger has been taken to
an animal sanctuary.
The next story takes us to the heart of Clipping country, Florida,
where a female motorist reported that a man walking along the motorway
near Key Largo had begun masturbating as she drove past him. When
officers found 20-year-old Amado Enrique Guare in the car park of an
adult bookshop nearby, he said that, although he'd been on his way to
buy a porn video, he'd become 'impatient' upon seeing the woman.
According to Adam Linhardt, spokesman for the Monroe County
sheriff's office, Guare has been jailed for indecent exposure and
possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.
Similar impatience in Florida was displayed by a 21-year-old woman,
Samantha Jewel Hernandez, who prompted a call to the emergency
services about a 'naked and belligerent' woman. When the police
arrived, her boyfriend of two years, sporting a scratched face
and ripped shirt, explained that she had wanted to engage in sexual
intercourse with him and he'd declined.
Hernandez told the police both 'I didn't do anything!' and that she
was too intoxicated to report what exactly had happened.
According to the arresting officer, she followed up by repeatedly
striking her head against the partition in the police cruiser and then
'pretended to be unconscious'. The latter action prompted him to
check on her, whereupon some spitting added 'Felony Battery on a Law
Enforcement Officer' to her rap sheet.
After a jam session with friends, Delaware's Justin Koerner fell asleep in his car and started dreaming. When he awoke, the vehicle had crashed through a garden and into a bush. As the police prepared to take him into custody, a neighbour's security-camera recording revealed that, matching Koerner's dreams, someone had jumped into the car and driven off. In the footage, the car thief panics upon seeing a slumbering man in the rear seat, exits the moving vehicle, and joins his compatriots in a Suburban. Local authorities later arrested four men in a Suburban for having stolen several cars.
Arizona's Joshua Louis Hillyard, 28, was a mentor and role model in an
outreach programme for teenagers. He sent photos of his tattoo to a
participant in the programme, a 16-year-old girl who proved less than
thrilled to see images of Hillyard's 'Fun Size' penis and to read the
accompanying messages.
Hillyard reportedly told the Cottonwood police that, although he
knew the girl's age, he'd believed the state's age of consent to be
16 'because that is the law in Montana', where he was on probation for
burglary, fraud, and sale of dangerous drugs. He has now been detained
for 'furnishing harmful materials to a minor'.
In November 2012, a laid-back outdoor meeting of the Madeira Beach,
Florida, City Commission took a darker turn when member Nancy Oakley accused
colleagues Shane Crawford and Cheryl McGrady of engaging in an extramarital
affair (they are now married). It is alleged that, just after the
meeting, she approached Crawford and slowly licked from his neck up
the side of his face, also grabbing his crotch and drunkenly attempting to
punch McGrady. In 2017, when Oakley stood for re-election, Crawford
filed a complaint with the state ethics commission.
The ethics board have unanimously upheld the complaint, with
administrative law judge Robert Cohen writing that 'licking a person
on the face and neck is too unusual to be contrived by multiple
witnesses and multiple [four] victims', although, as McGrady told
investigators, 'everyone kind of talked about the fact that she licked
people - that's what she did when she got drunk'.
Now, about a week later, Oakley has resigned, stating that, though
innocent, she wishes to put the controversy in this town of about 4,500
to rest.
Jeremy Davis is a 25-year-old man whom Columbus, Ohio, police revived after an apparent drugs overdose. While paramedics were looking him over and police officers were checking whether there were any warrants for his arrest, Davis sprinted from the ambulance and drove off with an unattended police car that was idling nearby. The car was found crashed about 3 km away, with Davis nowhere to be seen.
Long-time reader Aimee has drawn my attention to the death of Los Angeles news anchor Christopher Burrous. His wife may have been unhappy to hear where he died - in a Days Inn hotel room with a male sexual companion - but she may be even less happy now that she knows the cause of death: a methamphetamine overdose caused by two 'rocks' of meth placed in his rectum. According to the autopsy report, Burrous's companion followed these two ministrations with some amyl nitrate. He began to worry when the masked Burrous's vomiting and grunting gave way to unresponsiveness. After trying to administer CPR, he summoned medical help, who pronounced Burrous dead.
Nydia Carrillo-Maldonado, the owner of Connecticut's Little Bears
Beginnings Daycare, rang 911 to report that two-month-old charge Bella
Redondo wasn't breathing properly. The child later died in hospital
of blunt-force trauma to the head, with Stamford Police Lieutenant
Diedrich Hohn stating that police believe the baby's death from
two skull fractures was intentional. Before the 911 call,
Carrillo-Maldonado had placed three phone calls to Bella's mother, the
first of them three full hours before summoning help. In a statement
read in court, the mother said: 'I heard her screams in the background
[....] while you sat there for hours without doing anything to help
her.'
Carrillo-Maldonado's legal pleas changed a few times in the 2.5
years since the homicide, but at no time has she apologised or
mentioned feeling remorse. She has now been sentenced to 3.5 years in
prison.
We return to Florida for our final item, in which spectators at a
high-school wrestling tournament witnessed an interloper appear on the
wrestling mat - a 19-year-old man fell through a skylight about 12
metres above the gym, suffering serious injuries.
According to Alachua County Sheriff's Lieutenant Brett Rhodenizer,
at least eight people had been on the roof, of whom six have been
arrested. They had been searching for a mobile phone that someone had
thrown onto the roof. The health status of the phone has not been
revealed.
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bundle of Anna's News Clippings.
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