As the school year began, a fad of 'identifying as animals' swept a school in Oulu, northern Finland. Pupils there started expressing this by crawling on their hands, knees, and stocking feet (these 'Therians' explain that animals don't wear shoes). Ilta-Sanomat reports that the effects of their wet and dirty socks on other children ended up prompting the school to contact parents. Pupils now must conduct such role-playing outside school hours unless teachers believe that the child's psychological safety requires acting or dressing like an animal.
Paramedics alerted to a possible stroke victim in a Seymour, Indiana, alley found a heavily intoxicated woman with a whiskey bottle poking out of her handbag. She refused an invitation to hospital, so a police officer in attendance arrested her for disorderly conduct and hauled her 30 miles to the local jail. Staff there deemed her .255 blood-alcohol level too high for their cells, so the officer elected to 'unarrest' her and abandon her in the car park rather than wait for the number to drop. Concerned jail staff summoned a taxi and waited with the woman until it arrived.
A team-building exercise became a team-shrinking exercise when 14
office workers left the fifteenth stranded on Colorado's 4337-metre Mt
Shannon. As he grew disoriented, his co-workers ahead of him
collected items left in a boulder field to mark the downward path.
According to Chaffee County Search and Rescue, the man's momentary
mobile-phone connectivity was rewarded with colleagues' advice to
return to the summit, then take the marked route. That worked until a
storm broke, disorienting him anew. While he was falling about 20
times, it fell to them to report him missing, which they did 8.5 hours
after his descent began. With too little time to find the entirely
black-clad man before nightfall, weather-hampered rescue crews found
him only after he managed to reach 911 operators the next day.
Yokohama, Japan, brings us a tale featuring a different approach to
heights. In the lead-up to the new school year, a 17-year-old girl
there jumped to her death from a shopping-centre roof. Her fall
intersected with a 32-year-old woman on an evening walk with friends.
The pedestrian too died.
The teenager could face posthumous charges of manslaughter, such
that her family would be liable for compensating the victim's. This
is what happened in a similar case four years ago, when a 17-year-old
boy's leap from an Osaka shopping centre's roof killed another
student. In that case, the charge was ultimately dropped.
The 17-year-old girl in our next item survived. She and a companion entered an unoccupied New York City metro train at the Briarwood station, then took it for a brief post-midnight joyride in the borough of Queens. It isn't clear how they started the vehicle, but we know that they stopped it by colliding with a parked train. Although they fled after the crash, the female - recognisable for her pink attire, shower cap and all - has been arrested for criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.
![[IMG: Shower-cap miscreant looking pretty in pink]](images/showercapjoyrider_s.jpg)
An Aberdeen woman rooting around under her bed noticed an unfamiliar
device, which experts traced to her electrician, James Denholm. For a
decade, he had been placing cameras in women's bedrooms and bathrooms
to display and record their intimate moments. He brought a sex doll
into one customer's home and photographed it in items of her
clothing.
Recently admitting guilt for 15 voyeuristic offences, he was
sentenced to two years and eight months behind bars. Summing up the
excuses on offer, defence counsel David Moggach state that Denholm,
34, has a disorder on the autism spectrum and 'find[s] it difficult to
articulate his reasoning'. Meanwhile, several victims have their own
psychological issues to face; some opted to move house, with one later
reporting that 'I have even been checking rooms in my new place - I
keep checking in nooks and crannies, looking for cameras'.
The next item focuses on physical issues instead. While on holiday in
August, Alabama's William Bryan, 70, underwent liver-removal surgery
at Florida's Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast Hospital. The
problem was that general surgeon Thomas Shaknovsky was supposed to
remove his spleen and found a vastly enlarged 'spleen' out of place
in his abdomen. Bryan died on the operating-room table.
In a privately settled case last year, Shaknovsky removed parts of a
pancreas instead of an adrenal gland. Still, hospital staff assured
Bryan and his wife that returning home for surgery would be too risky.
Also in Florida, a police officer undoing his protective equipment before doing his business at an Oviedo convenience store lost track of his SIG Sauer P320 service weapon. Two men entering the stall shortly after this found it point-down in a toilet-paper roll, and surveillance footage shows one of the two leaving with something tucked into his waistband. According to the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, the $600 pistol was then sold for $40 via 'a CashApp'. The cops recovered both it and the two men, ages 23 and 26, one of whom was a 'violent felony offender on probation'.
A motorist in a Los-Angeles-area car-pool lane stopped her vehicle to let her passenger rescue a kitten from the freeway. As she blocked traffic, he successfully collected the feline but was nearly hit by a vehicle pushed into his path by a driver swerving to avoid the rapidly forming queue of vehicles. The rear-ended car ended up colliding with a lorry rather than our would-be hero, who leapt over the centre divider and dropped the kitten in the process. According to the California Highway Patrol's Javier Navarro, three cars were damaged and the cat 'made it across on his own'.
In other news involving the California Highway Patrol, they had to contend with more than they expected when arriving to clean up a truck-spill site where a flatbed trailer had shed its load of red peppers. This is because the bell peppers had also attracted the attention of local residents - the hiveful of bees who had been minding their own business in a sign pole damaged in the crash. While multiple lanes were closed to traffic, Swarm Catchers staff hoovered the bees up for relocation.
Surprise animals also appeared recently in Connecticut, where farm-owner Amanda Maresca reported that all three bison that had 'knocked over' wire fencing and escaped from confinement had returned of their own volition. Along with a fourth bison, a newborn calf. The Guilford Police Department reported that after 'a few eventful days' of bovine maternity leave, everyone around 'knows buffalo have the right of way at every intersection now'.
For more traumatic animal-related news in California, we can turn to Vicente Arroyo, who lived next door to facilities where people were keeping their pets in the village of Prunedale: a three-hour shooting spree there left the pens with 81 fewer miniature horses, parakeets, goats, and other animals. Although the 39-year-old Arroyo is accused of employing an impressive array of long rifles, handguns, and other firearms to dispatch this catalogue of creatures, he did leave at least seven firearms, an AK-47 among them, in his trailer home.
After months of hunting for Deario Wilkerson in connection with a fatal shooting, authorities traced him to a home in Memphis, Tennessee. He almost literally fell into their lap. As the U.S. Marshals Service began their search, the 20-year-old murder suspect immediately sought refuge in the building's attic - and immediately crashed through the ceiling. Having hastened his arrest, he was taken into custody without further ado.
Responding to an early-morning report about someone stranded in the water in Bempton, Yorkshire, a Royal National Lifeboat Institution crew found the victim devoid of life. Identifying him brought peace of mind, however - he was 'Dead Fred', a training dummy lost two weeks earlier by another RNLI crew. Thanking the Filey station for recovering their man-overboard mannequin after Fred's 110 km holiday, the Hartlepool team made a trip of their own, collecting him in exchange for a parcel of treats.
The UK-centred rescue in the next story spanned a considerably longer
distance. A panicked Albanian man told emergency-services dispatchers
in Delaware: 'Please, my brother called me. He's with a boat; they are
going down.' The vessel was sinking in the English Channel, and the
caller had conducted a Web search for 'Dover Police Department'.
Teasing out the vital details, MacKenzie Atkinson followed protocols
for a vessel in distress, and fellow staffers were speaking with the
UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency and at least five other requisite
agencies within four minutes. Armed with the boat's co-ordinates,
rescuers brought all aboard to (the correct) Dover safely.
Austria's Kronen Zeitung reports on the case of a 33-year-old man
airlifted to University Hospital Graz after incurring serious head
injuries from an accident in a forest. While emergency surgery proved
successful, an anonymous complaint filed with the Graz prosecutor's
office raised questions. Allegedly, the neurosurgeon had actively
involved her daughter in the operation, even letting the 13-year-old
drill open the patient's skull while a senior surgeon and five other
staff looked on.
The hospital confirmed that both doctors have been suspended from
duty for the duration of the inquiry - an investigation about which
the patient had read generic media reports before police told him that
he had been, in solicitor Peter Freiberger's words, 'the guinea pig'.
It appears that Alex Chromis, 76, made a mistake by taking a shower
at the Econo Lodge motel during a business trip to Erlanger, Kentucky.
Jets of water in excess of 65 degrees Celsius knocked him to the
floor, pummelling him until his two co-workers could respond to his
screams and drag him from the tub. Not recognising the extent of his
injuries, he carried out his festival-food-sales duties as planned.
Two days later, he checked in at Miami Valley Hospital, where he
remained until his death five months later.
Filing a wrongful-death suit against the motel, his niece stressed
that the uniform plumbing code dictates a maximum temperature of 49
degrees. Chromis's relatives have been awarded slightly above two
million dollars. Taking issue with this, the defence continue to
claim that Chromis didn't even stay at the Econo Lodge.
When Jennifer Heath Box, 50, stepped off her a cruise liner in
Florida on Christmas Eve 2022, she planned to return to Texas and bid
her 20-year-old son farewell just before his deployment to Japan.
Instead, she stepped into the arms of the cops, who handcuffed her and
whisked her off to the county jail, where she was strip-searched and
labelled as the abuser of somewhat younger children, ages three and
five. Though a check of Heath Box's driving licence found no arrest
warrants, her licence photo perfectly matched the image that the cops
had linked to a woman 23 years younger and of another ethnicity, with
a different hair and eye colour.
When released from jail, less than a week later, she received the
parting words 'I'm sorry - it happens'. Two days later, the case
against the actual suspect, Jennifer Delcarmen Heath, was dropped.
Heath Box has filed a lawsuit, while two counties' police are busy
pointing fingers at each other.
Had his plan gone as intended, former police officer William McBurnie,
57, could have increased the efficiency of a funeral home in Jedburgh,
Northern Ireland. In what he admits was attempted double murder,
McBurnie drove his car through the front of the establishment, run by
46-year-old ex-girlfriend Zoe Turnbull, as his way of coming to terms
with what she has described as an abusive relationship.
McBurnie, who sustained a minor hand injury in the crash, said:
'Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking' when stepping out of his car
at three times the legal alcohol limit. Meanwhile, Turnbull was left
with hearing loss and other issues. The other intended victim, her
mother Beverley, 71, went into cardiac arrest twice after picking her
way from the building.
![[IMG: A load of bulls leaving the car park]](images/ALoadOfBulls8.png)
![[IMG: A load of bulls beyond the car park]](images/ALoadOfBulls3.png)
A makeshift rodeo pen created for a one-day event in the car park of
a Massachusetts shopping centre proved insufficiently secure for eight
combat-trained bulls. Breaking through low fencing, they made a break
from Emerald Square Mall's Festival Rodeo and headed for US Highway 1,
with rodeo participants and the emergency services in pursuit. One
bovine was captured, and the seven others entered the woods behind a
brewpub, then set out to explore the back yards of North Attleboro.
Local resident Chris Mooney found six self-confined bulls behind his
garden fence, and the final animal was corralled two days after the
rodeo. Reportedly, it had returned to the shopping centre.