crime

Chris Knight's avatar

“This is an emergency, my McNuggets are an emergency.” That was the rationale proffered by one Latreasa L. Goodman, 27, of Fort Pierce, Florida. Last week Goodman went into a McDonald’s restaurant and ordered a 10-piece Chicken McNuggets. She paid the money but was then told that the location was out of McNuggets. The staff offered her a McDouble but she didn’t want that.

So Goodman called 911 and reported the “emergency”. And not once, but three times. She’s now due in court on a charge of misusing the 911 service.

If Goodman caused this much trouble over McNuggets, then thank Heaven she didn’t go nuts after being told the McRib had gone away again....

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Chris Knight's avatar

So help me, my eyes are tearing up with laughter after reading that headline, even though this really is a horrible story…

Travis, a 200 pound, 15-year old chimpanzee who had appeared in TV commercials and “was toilet trained, dressed himself, took his own bath, ate at the table and drank wine from a glass”, went berzerk last night in a Stamford, Connecticut neighborhood after breaking loose from his owners’ custody, and then severely mauled Charla Nash with “life-changing, if not life-threatening injuries” to her face and hands. Travis’ owner Sandra Herold had to beat the ape off her friend with a butcher knife and a shovel.

Travis had earlier been given tea laced with the anti-depressant Xanax. He proceeded to terrorize the streets before being shot dead by Stamford cops, after Travis opened the door of a police cruiser and attempted to enter the vehicle. According to one report...

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Leopold Wrobel of Wingerforth, England has been remanded to gaol by the constabulary for a period of twenty weeks after being found guilty of harassment and violating an “antisocial behavior order” that was sought against him by his neighbors.

Apparently, what Michael and Kathleen Sharpe found so offensive is that Wrobel would constantly whistle the theme music from The Addams Family whenever he saw them.

In his defense, Wrobel claimed that he was only whistling at his dog. But “closed-circuit TV footage shown to the court depicted him repeatedly whistling when the couple left their house or arrived home.”

I don’t know what’s more disturbing: this guy’s whistling fetish, or the fact that England now has so many surveillance cameras that one was looking out for Wrobel’s performance....

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Chris Knight's avatar

It was on this day in 1929 that the mob war between Al Capone and Bugs Moran came to a violent head inside the garage of the SMC Cartage Company in Chicago. Seven members of Moran’s gang were ambushed in a well-executed plan by Capone’s enforcers (some dressed as Chicago policemen) and butchered mercilessly by machine gun fire. Moran himself by some twist of luck managed to avoid being at the scene.

Read more about the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre here....

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Elvis Alonzo Barrett of Boynton Beach, Florida has learned the hard way: real life is not like Grand Theft Auto IV.

This past week Barrett fled police who were already trying to ticket him for one traffic violation. He led authorities on a high-speed chase that had him running through red lights, crashing into another car and then a fence. When he was finally caught, he was also found in possession of a quantity of crack cocaine.

When the final tally came in, Barrett had racked up more than FIFTY traffic citations in a single day, including one for not wearing a seat belt. He was also driving with a suspended license.

I wonder if the cops missed any. I mean, after thirty or forty citations it’s hard to keep up…...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Just when you think there are enough aliens lurking around 7-Eleven…

Police in Denver, Colorado are looking for a man who committed armed robbery at two of the convenience stores. The weapon of choice for the assailant? A “bat’leth”: the customary sword of Klingon warriors in the Star Trek universe (modeled here by Worf), first forged by Kahless the Unforgettable during the Earth’s Ninth Century.

At least he wasn’t a Doctor Who fan trying to hold up stores with a toilet plunger…...

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Tycho Brahe was one of the most accomplished astronomers in history. He was also quite the eccentric: for most of his life he wore a metal nose to replace the real one that he lost in a duel, he kept a dwarf human as something of a pet, and supposedly he died in 1601 from straining his bladder. The story goes that Tycho was at a party, had too much wine to drink and thought it would be the acme of “bad manners” if he did the sensible thing by going out to “drain the main vein” (as my old Bible study partner once put it).

Now a group of scientists are preparing to exhume the body of Tycho Brahe, more than 400 years after his death in Prague. Their motive for disturbing the great scholar’s remains: investigating the possibility that Brahe was poisoned as part of a contract killing...

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On his last full day as President of the United States (thank God), George W. Bush commuted the prison sentences of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

And even with this, the worst President in American history managed to completely screw it up.

The sentences of Ramos and Compean have been commuted: the two former Border Patrol agents have not received full pardon. And it is nothing less than a pardon which Ramos and Compean deserve for doing their jobs as best they could. The fact remains that each of the two has a conviction on his record that will follow them after release from prison. And speaking of which, their release isn’t immediate anyway: Bush made it so they couldn’t see freedom until March 20th.

And they wouldn’t have received a commutation of their sentences anyway had it been left to the “conscience” of Bush. Millions of people and ...

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O.J. Simpson has been transferred to Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada, where he will begin serving his 9-33 year sentence for kidnapping and armed robbery.

I well remember October 3rd, 1995: the day that the verdict in his murder trial was read. You could literally hear the gasps of disbelief all across the Elon campus. “I can’t believe he got away with it!!” is what most people were saying.

“He didn’t get away with it,” I told one friend. “One day, and it may not be in a way that we will ever see, but eventually Simpson will be punished somehow, if he did it.”

Does anyone today doubt that he did do it? Or that his personal character has, at last, come back to haunt him in a way that this time, he could not escape?

O.J. Simpson has been a festering keloid on the face of American ...

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