News of the Weird

-- In September, Pinellas County, Fla., officials unveiled what they hope will be a cutting-edge traffic safety program as a model for reducing pedestrian deaths and calming drivers' road rage. The program asks pedestrians to extend their right hands (as if shaking hands) continuously through an intersection, while smiling, to get the attention of drivers. Said a worker in Clearwater, Fla., when the program was explained by a St. Petersburg Times reporter: "Nobody is going to walk across the street with their arm out. I'm not going to do it. Are you?"

In separate incidents in the same week in September, Debra Rodriguez, 41, of Ames, Iowa, and Kristin R. Smebak, 34, of Superior, Wis., both of whom had been drinking, forced their young kids to drive their cars home so the mothers would avoid DUI tickets if they were stopped. Rodriguez's inexperienced 11-year-old daughter caused a rollover, injuring both occupants, but Smebak's inexperienced 8-year-old son made it safely over the bridge connecting Duluth, Minn., to Superior before being spotted by a patrolman, who arrested Smebak.

-- According to police who arrested Fairfax (Va.) High School math teacher Fred Benevento, 47, in April during a drug sting, Benevento said the 13 plastic bags of crack cocaine in his car "came flying through his open window" and that he "was just looking at them when the police officers arrived."

-- Failed Murder Defenses: In May, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5-to-4 to reject Brad Stone's "automaton" defense, that he was able to stab his wife 47 times only because he was in a robotic state brought on by the trauma of being called a bedroom failure. And in June, an Atlanta jury rejected Christopher Stobbart's claim of self-defense for shooting his boss in the head 14 times, then walking to another room, reloading and shooting him 10 more times.

-- Of Course! In July, just after the end of the war, Yugoslavia's ecology minister said the uncomfortably warm and rainy spring and summer weather was caused by NATO aggression. And in May, a mother in St. Cloud, Fla., told police that the reason she let her teen-age daughters smoke marijuana was so they wouldn't become alcoholics like their father. And Yuji Nishizawa, who hijacked the All Nippon Airways Boeing 747 in July and killed the pilot before being captured, told police his main motivation was to see how a real plane flew, after all the flight-simulation video games he had played.

-- West German criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, writing in the weekly Die Zeit in July, blamed East Germans' proclivities for post-war Nazism and thuggery (they are four times more likely to engage in those activities than West Germans) on too-rigorous potty training. After World War II, the East German government issued manuals on toilet-training for kindergartners, requiring virtually synchronized movements that stripped the kids of their individuality and reinforced government control.

-- Muriel Milne's trial began in Aberdeen, Scotland, in September against the Westhill Golf Club for maintaining a badly designed course, an opinion she came to in 1994 after a ball she hit struck a 2-inch-high rock and bounced back, hitting her in the eye and causing severe damage. (The trial is recessed until November.)

-- Escapee Jimmy Haakansson, in court in Stockholm, Sweden, on a theft charge and who broke a foot leaping through a courthouse window before being recaptured, filed a lawsuit against the police in September for failure to prevent his foolishness. One week earlier, in Roseville, Mich., Cassidy L. VanHorn filed a lawsuit against homeowner Diana Folbigg, whose house he had broken into in July 1997; according to the lawsuit, Folbigg lured VanHorn back to the house the next day, saying all was forgiven, but when he arrived, several of Folbigg's friends beat him up.

According to a Cox News Service report in August, citing official state records, 21 people were fatally run over last year in North Carolina while lying in the middle of the road. (Most incidents occurred around midnight, in the summer, to very intoxicated men.) A few days later, the British Health Education Authority announced that 43 people had been killed in 1998 frying up chips late at night. (The vast majority of victims were intoxicated.)

Police in Fall River, Mass., have been unable to find, since May, the dog owner who trained his pit bull to sharpen his teeth on trees and consequently killed more than 30 in a city park. And in July, an Irish wolfhound freed itself during a United Airlines flight into San Francisco and gnawed through landing-gear wires, but pilots landed the plane safely. And in July, after a Spanish Fort, Ala., police officer pepper-sprayed an alligator that was creating a public menace, the gator bit a $500 chunk out of the officer's cruiser.

Last year, News of the Weird named "Dr." John Ronald Brown "Chief Surgeon to the Weird" upon disclosure that after having had his license revoked for incompetence in 1977, he became the underground surgeon of choice for apotemnophiliacs (who get sexual gratification from having an arm or leg removed). However, one of his patients had died, and in October 1999, a San Diego jury found Brown guilty of second-degree murder. (That same week, Miami Beach's "Dr." Reinaldo Silvestre, who unlike Dr. Brown was never licensed, was arrested after botching several plastic surgeries, including one in which he used a spatula to cram breast implants into a former Mr. Universe runner-up who was expecting only pectoral implants.)

Insufficient Reasons to Kill Yourself: Husband changed the TV channel (woman in Colombo, Sir Lanka, took poison, May); minor car accident (19-year-old man immediately hanged himself from the tree he hit, Flint, Mich., April); police showed a court order to clean up a man's junky yard (man shot himself to death, Brickerville, Pa., March).

-- Quebec bureaucrats ordered an agricultural center to stop giving its cows "human female names" so as not to offend women. A lake-restoration project near Florida's Disney World caused several neighborhoods to be overrun by a half-million mice. Colin Linge, 54, retired after 29 years and 50,000 hours as a firefighter, having never fought a single fire (London, Ontario). Fourteen worshipers seeking eternal salvation were crushed to death when a crowd surged to touch a visiting evangelist (Abuja, Nigeria). A Washington Mutual bank informed a customer that, because of several mergers and relocations, it had lost his safe-deposit box containing $250,000 in family heirlooms. (Fountain Valley, Calif.).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- In August, the school district in Columbus, Ga., assigned aides to alter textbook photos of Emanuel Leutze's famous "Washington Crossing the Delaware" painting because some grown-ups thought parts of Washington's pocket watch, dangling against his thigh, might appear to fifth-graders to be the Founding Father's penis. The aides located matching paint and spent two weeks touching up 2,300 textbooks. Officials in Cobb County (Atlanta's northern suburbs) merely snipped the page from its textbooks.

In April in Alberton, Prince Edward Island, Judge Ralph Thompson gave drunk driver Dennis Joseph Peters, 45, only a suspended sentence for his fourth conviction, citing Peters' medical claim that he should not be jailed because he gets claustrophobic. And jailers in Quebec City sent drug trafficker Michel Racine, 57, home in July because the jail did not have furniture big enough to accommodate the 450-pound man. And in August, jailers in Independence, Iowa, released four Amish men who were serving time for vandalism, concerned that the lockup's modern conveniences (TV, running water) would corrupt the prisoners.

-- Cox News Service reported in August that Florida state-agency DNA paternity tests on child-support-resisting men found that 36 percent of 1,025 "fathers" in four counties were not the fathers after all. However, Florida courts are split on whether even a negative DNA test will relieve men of support responsibilities once they voluntarily begin paying.

-- According to police in Honolulu, Denny Usui, 28, at first told investigating officers in July that his grandmother wasn't home, but when they insisted on looking around, he became progressively more helpful: "Oh, I don't know, she might be here." Then, "Yeah, OK, she's in the shower." Then, "Oh, go inside; my grandma's bathroom is inside her room." Then, "Oh, I think she's dead. She's in the shower." And finally (but probably too late), "I don't want to say anything else until I speak to my attorney because this is a felony and I never committed a murder before."

-- According to a June Los Angeles Times report, about 40 violent male offenders (including murderers) at the Preston Youth Correctional Facility near Sacramento, Calif., are thriving in a program that teaches the rehabilitative effects of sewing. The tough guys stitch, knit and crochet booties and blankets for premature babies and to achieve what one teen (an armed robber) called sewing's "calming" effect.

-- In July, a British Army helicopter, helping on an archaeological dig near Red Deer, Alberta, experienced a wild swinging of its cargo and was forced to jettison it in order to stabilize the chopper. The cargo was a large package of dinosaur bones said to be 68 million years old, which was smashed into splinters. Said the pilot, "I'm very sorry."

-- Firefighters in Nixa, Mo., failed to make it to a burning house in a cul-de-sac in May in time to save it. The problem, said the fire chief, was that too many people were attending a crowded yard sale in a nearby house and were reluctant to move their cars to allow the engines to pass. And, said the chief, "When we were pulling out the hoses, they were tripping over them to get a look."

-- More than 63,000 people visited the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., in July and August to see the rare (considered by some botanists as their holy grail), huge Sumatran titan arum plant blossom to produce the world's largest flower. It is also possibly the world's most putrid, resembling rotting flesh and luring not bees but dung beetles. Coincidentally during the run, renowned botanist Bastiaan J.D. Meeuse passed away in Kirkland, Wash., at age 83; he was best known for his work with the large voodoo lilly, which produces half-pound flowers that generate their own heat and a stench comparable to the titan arum's.

-- Food in the News: Yogurt developed for the Russian space program, using bacteria from cosmonauts' saliva to bolster the immune system, will go on sale to the public soon, according to an August report in New Scientist magazine. And in May, Eiichi Urata, 59, was rescued after being lost for 15 days on a 7,700-foot peak in the Japanese mountains near Nagano; for the last 14 days, he had nothing to eat except two jumbo squeeze-tubes of mayonnaise, which he daubed on ice to make snow cones.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan, three employees of a psychiatric hospital were charged after bringing home seven prostitutes and killing and eating them in gourmet, ravioli-type dishes. And India's national news agency reported in August that a 3-year-old girl had been sacrificed to a Hindu goddess in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, in order to bring prosperity to the village, but that no arrests had yet been made.

News of the Weird has reported on parents too busy to arrange for sitters for their toddlers and who thus brought them along on crimes, most recently in 1998 when an Oregon woman robbed two banks with her three young daughters in the getaway car. In Paducah, Ky., in September 1999, Gloria Schoffner, 55, was arrested for prostitution in the front seat of a man's car; she had temporarily placed her 2-year-old granddaughter in the back seat while she conducted business.

In August, a 20-year-old man was electrocuted when he opened the power box on a lamppost in Newport Beach, Calif., and snipped a wire to attempt to dim the light to afford a better view of the Perseid meteor shower. And in July in New Freeport, Pa., a 19-year-old man, joking with friends about shooting himself in the head, accidentally pulled the trigger and killed himself.

A garbage-bag-wearing convenience-store robber was easily identified later by a clerk because his bag was made of transparent plastic (St. Petersburg, Fla.). A 31-year-old man had his own arm chopped off for the insurance money ($465,000) (Sao Paulo, Brazil). The Nebraska Bar Association rejected Paul Converse's application because it said he is too abusive to be a lawyer. Three teen-agers swiped a small, attractive box from Jo Ann Walker, assuming it to contain valuables when actually she had just walked her dog and had used the box for the droppings (Des Moines, Iowa). A hospital announced that a husband and wife had decided to trade roles and were undergoing sex-change operations (Szekesfehervar, Hungary).

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)

-- The death of a 49-year-old woman in Scotland in September brought to three the number of no-food, no-water, "breatharian"-diet followers of Australian Ellen Greve who have died of starvation in two years. Greve claims 5,000 disciples, charges more than $2,000 (U.S.) per ticket for her seminars, and sells her philosophy ("liberation from the drudgery of food and drink") to Westerners in part to confer a spirituality on Third World hunger. Eating-disorder specialists quoted by the Times of London said, of course, that there is no scientific basis for Greve's teachings.

Sixteen people are still imprisoned for lengthy sentences entirely as a result of wildly inconsistent and heavily coached testimony from children that they were ritualistically molested years ago by adults at day-care centers in Massachusetts and North Carolina and as part of a wave of sexual abuse in Wenatchee, Wash., though appeals court decisions in August and September increased to nine the number of people subsequently released. Former Wenatchee police Det. Robert Perez continues to tour the state defending his arrests, which began with allegations by his then-10-year-old foster daughter (whom he later admitted roughing up when she tried to change her story) that dozens of adults had sex with dozens of children in dozens of places in town weekly for nearly six years.

-- In a Stettler, Alberta, courtroom in June, police describing their arrest of David Zurfluh, 18, told how Zurfluh, in the back of a squad car after being stopped for DUI, ripped a large swath from his undershorts and stuffed it in his mouth, hoping, he later said, to absorb the alcohol in his breath before taking a Breathalyzer test. Though the courtroom was in stitches, Zurfluh had the last laugh when the judge dismissed the charge after officers admitted that Zurfluh's reading was not high enough.

-- From a May police report in The Messenger (Madisonville, Ky.), concerning two trucks being driven strangely on a rural road: A man would drive one truck 100 yards, stop, walk back to a second truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the first truck, stop, walk back to the first truck, drive it 100 yards beyond the second truck, and so on. According to police, the man's brother was passed out drunk in one of the trucks so the man was driving both trucks home. (However, a blood-alcohol test showed the driver, also, to be presumed-impaired.)

-- Carol Champion, upon being given a special award by the London Tourist Board in July for outstanding work as a restroom attendant, said at a special ceremony: "I just want to thank my manager, Richard, the cleaning staff, the maintenance men, my customers, and everybody who knows me. I could not have achieved this without them."

-- Of Course! Pest control specialists cited in the newspaper feature Earth Week in June said that last year's El Nino storms caused a huge rat infestation in Southern California, and especially around Beverly Hills. And in the middle of a drought emergency, the annual Waynesburg, Pa., July 29th Rain Day festival was hit by rain for the 105th time in 126 years. And after a judge in Edmonton, Alberta, ordered a 40-year-old sex offender in July not to keep pornographic magazines at home, the man admitted he had some but said he was only reading the articles.

-- On July 1, the Dallas Better Business Bureau began charging consumers $9.50 for the privilege of listening to their complaints of being ripped off by local businesses.

-- In April in Riverside, Calif., Allen Randolph Payne, 40, was sentenced to 1,113 years in prison for molesting his three daughters over most of their adolescent and teen years. Not only did their mother, Carol Payne, side with Allen at trial, but, according to one daughter, Carol once chased her around the house with a baseball bat and a gun after finding her in bed with Allen.

-- In March, a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization conference in Italy issued a news release encouraging a growth in world food supply by increasing the rabbit population but expressed concern that governments would miss the opportunity because of their "lack of training" in getting rabbits to breed.

In August, Dubbo, Australia, magistrate David Hellpern dismissed charges against an Aboriginal man for shouting "Fuck off!" to a police officer, calling the word "extremely commonplace now," having "lost most of its punch." But in August in Colorado Springs, Colo., a state liquor control agent removed 29 signs containing the word from Leonard Carlo's tavern, e.g., a bottled-beer-only sign worded "No Fucking Tap Beer." On Oct. 7, the ACLU obtained a temporary restraining order against the liquor agency, arguing that the word was part of Carlo's "image and character." (Carlo, who named his dog Fuck You, uses the word frequently, though he told a female reporter for the Denver Rocky Mountain News that he hoped he hadn't offended her.)

News of the Weird has reported several cases of animals' DNA being crucial to criminal cases, including pets' blood and hair in human murder cases (1997 and 1998) and prime-rib DNA as important to a cattle-rustling case (1994). In July 1999, The Wall Street Journal reported that Canadian authorities will introduce a test in November to make it easier to catch tree thieves (a $50 million (U.S.)-a-year crime industry) by comparing the genetic material from stumps with that of recently cut logs.

Cops Making It Look Easy: Jason L. Miller, 19, with a warrant outstanding, was arrested again in Elgin, Ill., in May when an officer recognized him as he showed up for a police ride-along program he had signed up for. And Kent Mayes, 42, was arrested in Deridder, La., in August when he flagged down a passing car and offered to sell drugs to the occupants, even though they were narcotics officers wearing badges and guns and even though one of them had arrested Mayes several times in the past.

Angry that a neighbor's grass trimmings had flown into his yard, a man pounded the neighbor with a nail-studded board (Herndon, Va.). A murder trial was postponed when the defendant was called for jury duty that day and accidentally placed in the pool for his own trial (Ottawa, Ontario). A convicted man received additional jail time, for contempt of court, after he slit his throat in front of the judge, requiring 100 stitches (Bay Roberts, Newfoundland). A drug runner sued U.S. Customs for impatiently forcing surgical removal of seven heroin bags he had swallowed instead of waiting for them to pass naturally (New York City). A Boston traffic agency handed out leaflets during rush hour to explain re-routing problems but stopped when motorists slowing down for the leaflets caused a several-miles-long backup.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679, or Weird@compuserve.com.)