Trinidad and Tobago brings us butterfingers Batman and friends - well, a gang of robbers whose backhoe operation was directed by a caped black-clad, ski-masked figure with a tendency to trip over debris. Security-camera footage shows at least four people attempt to separate the vault from a cash machine on the smaller island, until breaking the arm of the backhoe they'd liberated from a nearby beach. When the group's efforts to heft the entire cash machine onto a small truck failed, they abandoned it on the pavement. The police continue to hunt for them and the stolen vehicle in which they fled.
When the family cat didn't return home by teatime, West Yorkshire's
Carl Crowther checked his doorbell-camera recordings: after gazing at
three-year-old rescue cat Nora for a while, an Amazon delivery driver
![[IMG: a still from the Crowther Ring camera]](images/Deliverers_keepers_losers_weepers.jpg)
had scooped her up and driven off. Commenting on the video via social
media a few days later, 41-year-old Catalin Stancu said he'd 'tried to
give the cat back but I forget the place I took it' and asked for the
family's address. In the end, police sergeant Cat Ryan's team traced
his number plate and recovered Nora. A court data followed.
Despite his insistence that 'I didn't steal it; I just took it' and
claims to have not seen Nora's collar, Stancu received an eight-week
suspended jail sentence, breaking a 13-year dry spell in a string of
convictions for 'dishonesty offences'. Outside court, he complained
that people back in Romania are taunting him over the incident. Nora,
meanwhile, reportedly is now reluctant to venture outside.
Comments on the break-up of his marriage prompted 35-year-old Daniel
Morgan to storm out of the New Inn, in the Welsh hamlet of Cefn
Rhigos. Minutes later, threats appeared online against publican
Christopher Common, who disregarded them until a bulldozer drove over
his car, through the pub's porch, and into customers' midst.
Although Morgan's father, from whose farm the bulldozer had been
stolen, didn't arrive in time to warn the Commons, he did manage to
interrupt the younger man's journey to his next target - his estranged
![[IMG: the pub porch afterward]](images/lightly_bulldozed.png)
wife's home - with a truck + trailer and, after those were bulldozed,
a digger. The latter ultimately beat the 'dozer cab into submission.
Locals have chipped in to repair the 25,000 euros' worth of damage
to the pub, and Judge Celia Hughes has handed Morgan a 40-month prison
sentence along with a 39-month driving ban, with credit for his recent
efforts to kick a cocaine and 6 pints/day drinking habit.
Various avenues exist when there isn't quite as much money as there should be. Nancy Napoles, the mayor of Tenancingo, Mexico, chose the 'fake your own kidnapping' route, in efforts to cover up embezzlement of 2.5 million euros from public coffers. Though a video shows her being forced from her car and made to pay the above-mentioned amount for freedom, a member of the public witnessed what happened prior to that. Her husband and brother-in-law, two of the pseudo-abductors, are on the run, while Napoles herself maintains that she is innocent and that the case has been 'politicised'.
Our next item, from Cambridgeshire, isn't the typical tale of a wayward child ending up in a dangerous-animal enclosure while inattentive parents don't look on. At Johnsons Zoo, a 30-year-old Norfolk man with learning difficulties was so enthusiastic about his two carers' suggestion 'Should we go to the crocodile house next?' that he decided to introduce someone else to the reptiles too. Hence, a three-year-old boy ended up on the other side of 'quite high fences', where he received critical injuries before the zoo-owner's wife could pull him free. Later, Detective Inspector Verity McCann stated that the police 'do not believe the man arrested [on suspicion of attempted murder] and the child are known to each other'.
Unmuffled backfiring reminiscent of a weed-eater drew a Flagler County, Florida, patrol officer's attention to a motorbike with neither a number plate nor lights. The ensuing action, which she deemed unworthy of the term 'pursuit' rather than 'scenic meander', nearly reached 65 km/hour at one point but hovered around 15 overall before depositing Brian Swartz, 33, on the ground. His 'rusty-parts bike' was impounded, and he was arrested, not least for operating a motor vehicle without a licence. The grounds for his 16 prior arrests since 2016 range from credit-card fraud and drugs possession to grand theft auto and possession of weapons and ammunition by a convicted felon.
Thanks, Osku, for finding two corpses for me. Marks in the dirt led sheriff's officers from a pickup truck left running in a remote Alabama dirt road to the body of strangulation victim Jessica Folds, 47. Right next to it in the woods lay the body of the truck's owner, Daniel Robbins. According to District Attorney Mike Segrest, the 44-year-old Robbins had died of a heart attack, with the likely cause being exertion in the course of efforts to dispose of the murder victim.
Let's leave you beside a lake in California's Sierra Nevada mountains.
There, at a campground on a sunny Saturday afternoon, cries for help
led Fresno County sheriff's officers to a man whose sunglasses had
fallen off while he was using one of the pit toilets at Camp Edison.
Yes, he landed in the waste tank while trying to retrieve them.
Officers took this opportunity to offer another example of what not
to do: four years ago, a California woman tumbled headfirst into a
vault toilet in Olympic National Park, following her mobile phone into
the waste vault. Though the phone was able to reach 911 dispatchers
after 20 minutes of climbing failure, things do not always go so well.