Let's begin with a state trooper's discovery of $5,000 in banknotes in the middle of a Monroe, Michigan, road, very near a bank The officer expected things to be simple after bank personnel provided the phone number of the customer who had recently withdrawn this amount of cash. However, according to the state patrol, 'the subject must have been listening to our public service announcements on being a victim of fraud and believed he was being scammed'. After hanging up on the trooper several times, the man recognised that his withdrawal had withdrawn itself from his trouser pocket. He was then reunited with it.
I'll now add my two cents on a simple truck spill. Except that it's
closer to 10 cents, give or take six orders of magnitude, and the
clean-up ended up rather complex.
A![[IMG: Dimage control]](images/change.jpg)
lorry from a US Mint facility overturned when the driver
over-corrected his steering. This left a load of freshly stamped dimes
scattered over a Texas motorway. For the next 14 hours, clean-up
workers hoovered eight million 10-cent pieces into a collection truck
while other crews sifted through the dirt by hand and undertook
multiple street-sweeper passes.
These actions left the public confused, so Texas Department of Public
Safety spokesman Sergeant Tony de La Cerda offered assurances that
this was not a leak of hazardous materials and that uniformed United
States Armored Company personnel were present only to count the
change. Or maybe that's just what they want you to think...
O![[IMG: Chewy in action, courtesy of Springfield police bodycams]](images/MethRaccoon.png)
hio police officer Austin Branham smoothly detained motorist Victoria
Vidal, who had a suspended driving licence and an arrest warrant. He
stopped short, though, when returning to her car: now perched in the
driver's seat was Vidal's pet raccoon, with a glass pipe in its mouth.
As soon as Branham confiscated this and noted, with a laugh, that 'the
raccoon's playing with her meth pipe!', the animal raised a second pipe
to its mouth.
Inspection of the car revealed a 'bulk amount of methamphetamine',
some crack cocaine, and three used meth pipes. At least Vidal, 55,
had full documentation of her legal ownership of Chewy the raccoon.
The Lufkin, Texas, police department spread the news about an Easter Egg hunt advertised on Facebook. The twist is that the cops were hunting for the man behind the hunt, who had posted clues for folks eager to scour the city's parks for plastic eggs containing marijuana. Officers' scavenger hunt did not lead them to the culprit - identified on the basis of Facebook posts as Avante Nicholson - but the clues did lead them to four of the eggs. Concluding that Nicholson had not placed the final one, they called off the latter search. The next day, a park-goer and his grand-daughter carried the fifth egg into department headquarters.
Brazil's Jordelia Pereira Barbosa embraced the Easter spirit by sending
chocolate eggs to her ex-boyfriend's family. Not keen to receive
credit, she bought these while in disguise and had a bicycle courier
deliver them. Receipts nonetheless emerged, shortly after the
children of her ex's current partner, Mirian Lira, were rushed to
hospital with symptoms of acute poisoning - poisoning that proved
fatal to seven-year-old Luis Silva.
Investigators then recalled an incident in which Barbosa, 35, had
attempted to insinuate tainted sweeties into a chocolate tasting at
Lira's workplace. This plot failed because she could not supply
credentials from the company she claimed to represent.
Meanwhile in Australia, a trial now making headlines is making clear
that 50-year-old Erin Patterson can boast a more impressive
dead-in-law tally. Though her estranged husband did not accept the
invitation for a home-cooked meal cum discussion of her medical
issues, his parents, aunt, and uncle did. Having enjoyed a beef
Wellington preparation inspired in part by a notice from the Victoria
Department of Health, all four were hospitalised the next day with
medical issues of their own. In the absence of evidence that they'd
consumed the locally growing death-cap mushrooms mentioned in
state-wide health advisories, three of the four ultimately succumbed
to Amanita mushroom toxins in the following week.
While Patterson's claimed cancer diagnosis had given her a cover
story for eschewing the beef dish, it soon became apparent that she was
cancer-free and had lied about having suffered symptoms similar to her
guests' and about having foraged for mushrooms. Patterson
maintains that she is innocent of anything murder-related.
Even mainstream food can lead to legal troubles, however. At
breakfast time, the police in Ogden, Utah, were alerted to a reckless
driver who had been swerving between lanes on a journey through
multiple jurisdictions. After a spike strip brought the vehicle to a
stop, the seven-year-old boy who'd been behind the wheel explained
that his goal had been merely to take his younger sister and the
family car to McDonald's for grabbing some food.
Though the car's owner declared her son 'probably grounded for the
rest of his life', his actions weren't the most reckless they
could have been: He made sure to bring money for the food, he buckled
his seat belt, and at least he'd not chosen Taco Bell.
He might have learnt his lesson. The hero of our next story didn't. On 22 April, a Chinese student ascending Mount Fuji placed an emergency phone call to report suffering from altitude sickness. Japan's rescue services airlifted the 27-year-old man from a spot about 3,000 metres above sea level. Four days later, the police received another summons to the mountain: the student had returned to the mountain's Fujinomiya trail, where the caller found him suffering from altitude sickness and this time unable to move. The rescuee had gone back for the mobile phone and other belongings he'd left behind.
Surgeons do not have a monopoly on mixing up left and right. In the aviation equivalent of wrong-side surgery, a British Airways co-pilot mistakenly moved the thrust lever to the left rather than the right just before takeoff for a flight from Gatwick Airport to Vancouver last summer. A report released by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch explains that the resulting thrust reduction caused a fire in the landing gear. Unable to gain the speed required for takeoff, the co-pilot aborted the flight and summoned fire crews. The runway was closed for 50 minutes, with 23 flights getting cancelled.
During a late-night domestic-disturbance call-out in Port St. Lucie, Florida, Allyson Swan told the police that all was fine - her wife, in a 'drunken rage', had merely thrown nachos on the floor and rolled around in them. The wife offered an alternative explanation for her cheesy clothing, the hole in the wall, and her head injuries: she'd been preparing cheese-covered crisps when Swan started kvetching about her late-night eating habits and weight, shoved a handful of nachos down her knickers, and started beating her. Officers found the latter account more credible, and Swan, 39, has been charged with battery causing bodily harm.