BODY OF EVIDENCE: In March, a jury failed to convict Dr. Raul Ixtlahuac, 41, of sexually assaulting patients at his practice in Gilroy, Calif. (acquittal on one count, a hung jury on the other five). Ixtlahuac’s lawyer believes the key evidence for his client was testimony by another doctor, who had measured Ixtlahuac’s erect penis at 5 1/2 inches, which the lawyer argued made it impossible, due to the doctor’s height and that of the examining table, for him to have committed the assaults in the manner that the victims described (unless, said the lawyer, he was an “acrobat”).
JUST, LIKE, SHUT-UP: The Palo Alto, Calif., City Council scheduled a final vote in May for a proposed code of conduct that includes (in order to coax civility among members) an official admonition to avoid even nonverbal forms of disagreement with each other, such as rolling one’s eyes or shaking one’s head or frowning. One former resident told the San Jose Mercury News that the proposal is a prime example of the “Palo Alto mind-set.”
BORN AGAIN: At the height of the war in Iraq, Army chaplain Lt. Josh Llano, 32, a Southern Baptist, commandeered 500 gallons of water to fill his baptismal pool at Camp Bushmaster near Najaf and offered exhausted, grimy soldiers a chance for a refreshing dip, provided they agreed to formal baptisms following a 90-minute sermon. Llano told a Miami Herald reporter: “It’s simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized.” (The Army’s chief of chaplains said he would investigate.)
DROP THE GUN, GRANNY: Wilma Bennett, 79, carrying a .22-caliber revolver and increasingly agitated at having to wait in line at a grocery store, was arrested after brawling with a 31-year-old security guard who tried to calm her down (Akron, Ohio, January). Gertrude Raines, 84, was charged with shooting her son-in-law dead at 200 yards in the midst of a longstanding family feud (Murfreesboro, Ark., January). Deer hunter Clinton Hurlbut, 89, pleaded guilty to reckless use of a gun after accidentally shooting the horse that a 12-year-old girl was riding (Browns Valley, Minn., November).
TAX GAMBIT: In a January ruling on the federal Tariff Code, the U.S. Court of International Trade declared the Marvel Comics X-Men characters to be “nonhuman creatures,” thus enraging the characters’ fans, who know perfectly well that the X-Men are humans. However, it was a Marvel Comics affiliate that called them nonhuman to begin with; the company was importing X-Men figurines, and at the time that the dispute with U.S. Customs arose, imports of “human” re-creations (called “dolls”) were taxed at 12 percent while imports of nonhuman re-creations (called “toys”) were taxed at 6.8 percent.
ALL IN THE FAMILY: In Lufkin, Texas, in January, Cody Carver, 19, was sentenced to eight years in prison for impregnating a 13-year-old girl but continued to insist that he and the girl could raise their child “if the world would only back off.” The girl’s mother knew the pair were sleeping together, according to a Child Protective Services report, but since she herself had had a baby at age 14, and her mother had had a baby at 14, and her grandmother had had a baby at 14, she thought there was nothing unusual. In a polygraph test, Carver admitted that his sexual partners had included two other underage girls, as well as a dog.
INSTRUCTIONS INCLUDED: In Penn Hills, Pa., in March, a 42-year-old man was attempting to tighten screws on his granddaughter’s crib using a knife, despite his wife’s admonition that he use the more appropriate Allen wrench. The next thing his wife knew, according to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was running to her, bleeding at the throat and screaming, “Call the paramedics! I fell on the knife!” The man died of his wound at a hospital shortly afterward. The wife (who had assembled the crib and asked her husband only to tighten the screws) later said she could not even imagine how he could have fallen on the knife.
Also, in the Last Month … : Hong Kong Tourism Board ads (promising that the city would “Take Your Breath Away”) debuted in several British magazines just as the SARS epidemic broke. And the Utah Supreme Court upheld the right of an atheist to pray aloud at a city council meeting (prayer of choice: to be delivered from “weak and stupid politicians”), since the council always opens with a public prayer (Murray, Utah). And four city council members in Mount Sterling, Iowa, proposed an ordinance to forbid its townspeople to tell lies.
2003 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2003.
