News of the Weird

-- Ignatius Piazza, 40, has completed $3 million worth of infrastructure toward his planned gated community 50 miles from Las Vegas in which every resident will be trained in firearms use, creating what he calls "the safest town in America." According to an April USA Today story, the town of Front Sight will have (by fall 2002) 12 shooting ranges, a private school and a convenience store to service buyers of its 177 lots, which cost $275,000 each (but come with various perquisites, including an Uzi).

Short schoolboys are twice as likely as tall schoolboys to get bullied (British Medical Journal, March); female inmates in solitary confinement are lonely (University of Alberta researcher, January); many women who work outside the home feel stressed (AFL-CIO poll, March); and drivers need to keep their minds (and not just their eyes) on the road (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, March).

-- In 1993 Patrick McDougall was convicted of sexually abusing several boys at a reformatory in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in the 1960s and 1970s, and after the trial, according to a January New York Times story, another 89 former residents claimed McDougall abused them, too, leading Nova Scotia to set aside about $17 million (U.S.) in compensation for victims. Publicity from that announcement and from McDougall's death last year has now produced 1,400 "victims" making about 14,500 abuse claims against nearly all of the 363 former employees, so that the claimants can avail themselves of payment scales ranging from about $2,400 for a beating to about $59,000 for sexual assault. The government is now rethinking the payment plan.

-- The lawsuit by the family of the late cold-blooded bank robber Emil Matasareanu is set for a September retrial after a hung jury in March on whether the city of North Hollywood, Calif., should pay because police officers might not have taken the mortally wounded Matasareanu to the hospital soon enough. The body-armor-wearing gunman and his partner provoked a televised, 44-minute, daytime firefight with police in 1997 in the bank's parking lot, firing more than 1,200 rounds from their automatic weapons, wounding 17; Matasareanu was hit 29 times and bled to death.

-- People Who Are Just So Upset: Ms. Cleanthi Peters, 57, filed a $15,000-plus lawsuit in Orlando, Fla., against Universal Studios for last year's Halloween Horror Nights exhibit; she said she expected it to be frightening but that it was too frightening. And Charles Settles filed a $2,000 lawsuit in Brunswick, Ohio, in January against his son's high school baseball coach, arguing that, because the team was so bad (winless on the season), it lost out on an all-expense-paid trip to a Florida tournament.

-- A 19-year-old woman, who was conceived by rape, filed a lawsuit in December seeking damages from school officials in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, claiming that since her biological father was a teacher there (and a notorious pedophile who is now in prison), school officials should have done more to prevent him from raping her mother, who was then a student. The woman complains that, since everyone in the community knew of the rape, she has so far led a very lonely and harassed life.

-- National Labor Relations Board lawyers argued at a March hearing that Tenneco Packaging plant (now named Pactiv), in order to disrupt union organizing in July 1999 at a plant in Beech Island, S.C., had activist-employee Gary McClain arrested and, with the help of friendly local law-enforcement, committed to a mental institution for two weeks under the pretense that it feared workplace violence. Tenneco officials said it was just a coincidence that the Aiken County sheriff chased McClain down on the road and arrested him the day after a big organizing meeting.

-- The Swedish Hotel Workers Federation protested in March that maids are at risk on the job because hotels feature hard-core pornography on television, leading some male guests to become "overexcited." Already, maids complain of having to clean off "sticky" television screens, and now demand to be furnished signal alarms in case they are attacked.

-- Ontario's Social Services Ministry, seeking to find savings in worker efficiency, announced in March that some employees would be fitted with electronic monitoring devices that would track their whereabouts nearly every minute of the workday for 16 weeks. A union official called the plan a gross invasion of privacy, especially since the obvious result of the project will be layoffs.

Canada's notorious Karla Homolka, 29, who was convicted in 1993 of helping her husband rape, torture, video and kill three teen-age girls including her own sister, wrote (in a note to her warden in November on why she should be sent to a halfway house and then paroled): "I (have) learned (in prison) to get rid of my mistrust, self-doubt, misplaced guilt and defense mechanisms. I am now completely in touch with my inner feelings. My self-esteem is quite high."

One of the widely reported stories of 1993 was the Vinton, La., crash of a car containing 20 naked Pentecostals from Floydada, Texas, who had received word from God that they should discard all their worldly possessions to make it more difficult for Satan to catch up to them. In April 2000, in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land, a state trooper stopped a car containing three women and a 3-year-old girl, all of whom were naked and who told the officer that God had told them to burn their clothes, drive to Wal-Mart, and buy new clothes. Said the trooper, "It's always something. No two days are the same in this job."

More Easy Identifications: Johnny Lee Miller, 32, was arrested for bank robbery in January in West Valley City, Utah; he had left behind a large envelope (in which he had concealed his gun) that contained a personalized certificate from a prison-sponsored course in anger-management, which he had completed during his last lockup. And a four-year credit-card-theft spree ended in March with the arrest of Elnetta Denise Brown, 28, in Tampa, Fla.; she had finally lost her anonymity by sitting for a Christmas portrait and paying with a stolen card.

A sheriff's SWAT team surrounded a house for seven hours because the sound of a blown tire nearby made a police officer believe he had been fired on from inside (Madera, Calif.). Three teen-age fast-food workers were charged in an eight-month-long binge of spiking food with urine, spit, Easy-Off oven cleaner and Comet (Scottsville, N.Y.). Brain-injury victims suffering from aphasia were found by researchers to have an uncanny ability to detect liars. A woman pled guilty to robbing a Bank of America to get money to make overdue payments on her mortgage, held by Bank of America (Richmond, Va.). British breeders announced they have produced six Labrador retriever-Chihuahuas to better serve hearing-impaired clients unable to manage larger dogs.

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

-- Fox Network's Far-Ranging Influence: On April 27, a reporter for Russia's RTR television arrived in the town of Ivanovo to shoot a piece on a housewife merrily feeding her family while her soldier-husband was away serving as a peacekeeper in Kosovo. However, the reporter had received word minutes before that the husband had just been killed on duty. Thus, the reporter shot some "before" scenes, in which the carefree wife earnestly spoke of her husband's imminent return, and then the "after" scene, featuring uncontrollable crying after the reporter broke the news to her.

In January, the general manager of a Ford-Toyota dealership in Lake City, Fla., told reporters that the acid-splashing vandalism on his lot should be punished as a hate crime because only Fords were hit. And in Berlin, Germany, owners of pit bulls and other aggressive breeds planned a May protest against proposed legislation to ban the dogs; organizers planned to dress their dog-victims with yellow Stars of David, which is what Third-Reich-era Jews were forced to wear as identification.

-- Recent Weapons: In a bar fight, one woman hit another on the head with a toilet lid (Rock Island, Ill., January). A 21-year-old man wielding a small python robbed a convenience store (Oklahoma City, December). A man holding a dildo and wearing a jockstrap over his head robbed a Hungry Howie's of $40 (Toledo, Ohio, February). A man robbed an adult sex shop, menacingly waving a vibrating tongue at the clerk (Pinellas Park, Fla., February).

-- Those Compassionate Canadians: The man who cleaned out the cash register at a Tim Hortons doughnut shop in Hamilton, Ontario, in February came back a few minutes later and returned the portion of the money that had been segregated as employees' tips. And in April, recently released sex-assaulter Jody Robinson, 33, offered one of his kidneys to his 1996 victim, who is awaiting a transplant.

-- Great Detective Work: Suspicious police in Spokane, Wash., after questioning Harold Anthony Mazzei, 32, at a January traffic stop, decided to arrest him: The only way Mazzei could turn off his car's engine was using pliers and a screwdriver (and, indeed, the car was stolen). And in February, suspicious police in Chicago decided to arrest Steven Coleman, 24, for robbing a family sewing-machine shop and provoking a fracas while the owner was heating chicken noodle soup for lunch: Coleman was later spotted nearby with noodles in his hair. And in November, suspicious police in Sydney, Nova Scotia, decided to arrest a 38-year-old man on drug charges after encountering him dazed with syringes hanging from both arms.

-- Police in Dublin, Ohio, arrested alleged veteran thief Rudolf Nyari, 64, in April for taking a diamond bracelet from Leo Alfred Jewelers. Nyari had handled the bracelet, then left the store, after which an employee noticed it missing. Police, aided by a license-plate number, stopped Nyari just outside town, searched his car fruitlessly, and threatened to take him for x-rays. Later, according to a detective, Nyari "drank several glasses of water and smoked cigarettes to build up enough phlegm to cough (the bracelet) up." The bracelet was 7 inches long and contained 39 diamonds.

-- A court in Lusaka, Zambia, issued a final divorce decree in March to John Sakapenda and Goretti Muyutu, despite Ms. Muyutu's last-second, unsuccessful attempt to persuade the judges that, by custom of her village of Chingola, the couple was obligated for one last round of sexual intercourse.

-- In December, the longtime North Korean ambassador to China issued another of his periodic rants in Beijing denouncing the 150-mile-long, high (16 to 26 feet tall) and thick (33 to 62 feet wide) concrete "wall of division" that South Korea built 20 years ago that "artificially bisects" Korea. Despite the vividness of the description, according to The New York Times and numerous diplomats from many countries who have visited the area, there is no wall there of any kind and never has been.

-- In Englewood, Fla., in February, minutes after Judy Neuhaus had scolded her son Ryan for not taking better care of his 1995 Mercury Cougar, a sputtering, single-engine Cessna cleared some trees and fell nose-first onto the car, doing considerable damage to both vehicles but not seriously injuring the pilot.

Mob informant Tommy Del Giorno, living a new life under the federal witness security program (quoted in a New York Times story in January): "Legitimate people are worse than mob people. All the time I was in the mob, I never really wanted to kill anybody. Out here in the legitimate world, there's 10 people I've met that I would kill."

In 1997 News of the Weird reported that a female murder suspect had sued Kiowa County, Okla., after an inmate had sex with her, impregnating her, through the bars of their respective cells in the county lockup. In February 2000, Britain's Prison Service launched an inquiry after Donna Stokes, 19, became pregnant after her boyfriend had sex with her through the bars of their temporary cells in the Swansea Crown Court building while both were awaiting a hearing on burglary and theft charges. Said Stokes of the couple's brief encounter: "We hadn't seen each other for months."

-- In April, a 43-year-old recreational snow-machiner was killed in an avalanche in Alaska's Hoodoo Mountains while "highmarking," or driving to hit ever-higher peaks on the slopes; earlier that day, he had been pulled, in shock, from another avalanche after highmarking and advised by rescuers to quit. And a 30-year-old motorcyclist was crushed to death near Phoenix in December after an apparent road-rage incident in which he sped up quickly to overtake a pickup truck, swerved in front of it, and then deliberately slammed on the brakes.

A 39-year-old man was convicted of selling cocaine, with an enhanced penalty because the deal took place near Rosemary Minor Park, which is named for a deceased community activist, who was the man's mother (New Orleans). A handcuffed stolen-car suspect allegedly took $23 from a state trooper's wallet while in custody in the front seat of a cruiser (Frederick, Md.). A 39-year-old driver, scheduled to report to prison in two weeks for his fourth DUI conviction, drove drunk and collided with another car, killing a 5-year-old boy (Stockton, Calif.). Thieves dug up and stole almost an entire backyard garden (trees, ornaments, shrubbery and cement pond) (Bristol, England). A medical journal reported that large-breasted women are more likely to suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome than small-breasted women (Tuscaloosa, Ala.).

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

-- Punch-Drunk From Litigation: The Brown & Williamson Tobacco company recently added another quixotic 800-number telephone message, this time featuring a male chorus serenading callers with "Oooh, the tobacco plant is a lovely plant / Its leaves so broad and green / But you shouldn't think about the tobacco plant / If you're still a teen." A 1999 message featured a sexy male voice intoning, "Brown & Williamson Tobacco is in love. We're a giant corporation, and you make us feel like a little kitten." "Thank you, lover."

At a January hearing in LaCrosse, Wis., child-molester Ellef J. Ellefson, 95, was ordered to remain confined beyond his sentence because experts said he was still incorrigible. Mr. Deo Dubbs, 88, was sentenced to probation-only in April in Sarasota, Fla., for buying crack cocaine, which he said gives him "pep." In April, first-time arrestee Ruth A. Goelz, 81, was charged in Hollywood, Fla., with running a $200,000 Ponzi scheme. Retiree Charles John Swanson, 71, was arrested in January for two armed bank robberies, allegedly committed because he was having trouble affording his rent in Palo Alto, Calif.

-- Camel Mania: A January New York Times report from Selcuk, Turkey, described the massively popular sport of camel-fighting (in which one-ton camels in mating season simply push against each other until one falls over), which brings fame to the winning owner. And in a March New York Times profile, well-to-do Istanbul builder Ethem Erkoc revealed that he has constructed 10 swimming pools for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who permits his favorite camels to frolic in them.

-- Henk Otte, 43, lives most of the year as an unemployed construction worker in an Amsterdam, Netherlands, housing project, but he is also the chief of about 40 villages (100,000 people) in a region of Ghana about 45 miles from the capital of Accra. According to a January Associated Press dispatch, Otte was visiting with his Ghanan-born wife in 1995 when suddenly natives concluded he was their reincarnated king. At that time, Otte's reaction was that the villagers were "insane," but now says that being king "is my destiny."

-- The Hanoi (Vietnam) Institute of Social Sciences reported in February that many men, fearful toward the end of the lunar new year, had apparently turned to sex with pregnant prostitutes as a way of releasing evil spirits.

-- Male Stereotypes Come to Life: In January, Quebec researcher Jim Pfaus told the Montreal Gazette that the rat is the "ultimate example" of the male mammal always on the lookout to copulate with new females and that when given alcohol, male rats notoriously re-attempt sex with females who had just rejected them. And schoolbus driver Alexandre Belvu, 31, was arrested in Brooklyn, N.Y., in January for taking three kids on a ride that lasted eight hours because he couldn't find their school and apparently would not stop to ask directions.

-- Unfair Ethnic Stereotypes Come to Life: In March, police chasing an escaped circus tiger in a suburb of Warsaw, Poland, accidentally shot and killed the veterinarian trying to tranquilize it. And according to a February New York Times story, the textile company Francital has developed a fabric specially treated to absorb perspiration and body odors for people who can't bathe for up to 30 days at a time; the company is headquartered in France.

-- Jose Chavarria, 37, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Adel, Iowa, in February. He had killed his friend Jorge Villalobos only minutes after lamenting to friends that a psychic had told him that Villalobos was planning to kill him first.

Sang Lee, the owner of a custom slaughterhouse near Minneapolis-St. Paul that serves the Hmong-American community (and speaking to a St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter in January concerning complaints about heavy slaughterhouse traffic): "We (Hmongs, natives of Laos and Thailand) have a complex culture, and we have to sacrifice animals a lot."

In February, an 8-year-old boy, coming to his mother's aid, stabbed her abusive boyfriend to death in Coker Creek, Tenn. And in an Islamic public execution in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in February, a 10-year-old boy, now the eldest male in the family, took a rifle and did the honors to the man who had killed his father. And in Dover Township, N.J., in March, a 10-year-old boy argued with his father over missing chocolate icing and then, when the father sarcastically suggested the kid just take a knife and kill him, the kid complied.

In the five years since Bill Davis made News of the Weird by settling his 20-year dispute with Rhode Island over the pile of 10 million used tires (he says it's 30 million) on his property in Smithfield, contractors have gradually removed 4 million tires, at 79 cents each, and sold them as fuel. Federal and state officials still believe that a fire on the land would cause catastrophic environmental damage to Narragansett Bay, in that each melted tire would release about a quart and a half of oil. (A similar fire in Westley, Calif., in September burned for a month.)

Ill-Conceived Crimes: In Biloxi, Miss., in January, Ronald Dean Cherry, 52, was arrested after he called the Treasure Bay Casino and threatened to start shooting their customers unless the company delivered $100,000 within two hours to his home (address helpfully provided by Cherry). And Ronald Keith Graham, 45, was arrested in Des Moines, Iowa, in February and charged with burglary; according to police, he had stolen a TV set but rather than try to sell it to one of Des Moines' other 200,000 residents, he invited its former owners to his apartment, where he offered to sell it back to them for $150 and even suggested an easy payment plan.

A 26-year-old woman started an agency to say prayers for people too busy to say their own (at $1.50 a day and up) (Milan, Italy). A woman was convicted of arranging for her lover to get a penile implant using her estranged husband's health insurance (New York City). A 20-year-old, brand-new mother was arrested in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; she had allegedly dealt $650 worth of cocaine from her room in the maternity ward. An Israeli rabbinical council authorized three tons of bread for starving Ethiopians but, because it was Passover week, was forced to send only religiously correct but notoriously hard-to-digest unleavened bread. The Centers for Disease Control estimated that a 20-cent tax increase on a six-pack of beer would reduce gonorrhea in young adults by 9 percent.

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