ANIMAL HEADS:
Palmer, Mass., construction contractor Anthony Morales, tired of fighting customer Gail Kapulka over payment of his bill, planted the freshly severed head of a deer on the front seat of her car on Christmas night, according to police. And a frozen sheep’s head was left inside a car owned by a Democratic political official in Lake Station, Ind., in January. In March, at a rock concert in Oslo, Norway, the part of the act in which the lead singer of the death metal band Mayhem carves up a dead sheep went wrong, and the sheep’s head was knocked into the audience, where it struck a fan in the head, requiring hospitalization. (Fan or not, he pressed charges.)
BULLY’S EYE:
An April Wall Street Journal report highlighted several states’ elementary school “anti-bully” policies that have banned rough-housing, name-calling, “mean looks” and pointed gossip to encourage teaching the little kids a language of sensitivity and tolerance. However, one problem some kids fear from such training and language is that, as they move up to middle schools and run into other kids who will be baffled by such sensitivity, the tolerance-trained kids are even more likely to get beaten up.
FROG IN THE EYE:
A 17-year-old boy lost sight in both eyes in a “potato gun” accident in Denton, Texas, in April. The “gun” (a length of pipe in which a household explosive is ignited, propelling a potato out the other end, although in this case, it was not a potato but a frog) was being experimented with by several teenagers but failed to fire, and the victim, who had been a mere bystander, stepped up to have a look down the pipe to see what might have gone wrong, just as the gun finally fired.
SPELL CHECK:
According to an Associated Press report, six candidates for city offices in Charleston, W.Va., misspelled their party affiliations in their official filing forms in January. Among the variations were “Democart,” “Democrate,” “Repbulican” and “Repucican.” In fact, one of the city council incumbents had, four years earlier, also declared himself to be a “Democart.”
HOPELESS RECIDIVISTS:
David Joe White Jr., 32, having just pleaded guilty to 42 burglary charges, was rearrested after swiping his lawyer’s portable tape recorder from the defense table (Attalla, Ala., February). Chan Kwok-keung, 34, was sentenced to four months in jail for stealing a court interpreter’s purse; he was in the courtroom at the time on theft charges (but had just been cleared) (Hong Kong, March).
THIRD WHEEL:
Jeannie M. Patrinos, 32, was sentenced in February to five years’ probation for sexual assault. A judge in Lancaster, Wis., found that Patrinos, who was estranged from her husband, broke into his home, climbed into bed with him, and was “having sex” with him, against his will. The husband’s girlfriend was asleep in the same bed, until the man’s protests woke her up.
CHUTZPAH!:
In February, Wesley Fitzpatrick applied to a Kansas City, Kan., judge for a temporary restraining order against a female whom he said was stalking him (making him “scared, depressed and in fear for my freedom”). However, after granting it, the order was rescinded when Fitzpatrick showed up to ask that it be made permanent, in that the “stalker” was actually his parole officer. Fitzpatrick was then arrested for not having met with her.
Smooth Reactions:
Door-to-door salesman Gerald L. Thompson, 19, was arrested in a neighborhood near St. Augustine, Fla., in February after he had become exasperated that no one was buying his magazine subscriptions. Allegedly, he forcibly prevented one homeowner from closing the front door, then screamed obscenities, pounded on the door and refused to stop ringing the doorbell. And Robert M. Suszynski, 47, was arrested in Rochester, N.H., in February after he allegedly slugged a neighbor with a baseball bat because he got tired of listening to the guy tell how much pain he was in from a recent fire.
Also, in the Last Month …:
A British rock music fan offered to sell his own flu germs derived from Paul McCartney’s recent bout of the flu (which the fan said he caught from a backstage session with McCartney), via either a coughed-into plastic bag or a vial of mucus. And a British designer introduced a 135-foot-high plastic inflatable church that he said Anglican Church vicars could carry around with them to recruit parishioners. And to express their new religious freedom, Iraqi Shi’ite pilgrims celebrated a long-suppressed holy day by the traditional, bloody slashing-open of their heads with swords (Karbala).
This article appears in May 7-13, 2003.
