Bite me: Police in Modesto, Calif., arrested Kelli Pratt, 45, in October and charged her with domestic abuse after she, enraged by her husband's refusal to have sex, allegedly held him down and bit him so viciously and so many times that his severely ripped-open skin was ripe for the bacterial infection that killed him six days later. Kelli suffers from multiple sclerosis and often uses a wheelchair; husband Arthur, 65, had recently been hospitalized for diabetes. Said an arresting officer, "(Kelli) refused to wash up (before we videotaped her), so she basically looks (on the tape) like a vampire with blood all over her face and teeth."
The Litigious Society: Otis Stansbury, 34, of Long Eaton, England, filed a lawsuit in August against door-to-door salesman Jay Sims and his company, Accident Group, whose business is helping customers in personal-injury lawsuits. Sims had just left the Stansbury home (after failing to sign them up) when, according to the lawsuit, he attempted to catch a ball among kids playing in front of the Stansbury home, slipped and fell on top of 6-year-old Yohan Stansbury, sending the boy to the hospital with head injuries. Cherise Mosley, 19, filed a lawsuit against the Aaron Family Planning Clinic in Houston in August, seeking damages for the abortion it performed on her two years earlier when she was a minor. Mosley admits that she produced a false ID card at that time, showing that she was over 18, for the express purpose of receiving the abortion without having her parents notified. Now, Mosley apparently regrets the abortion and claims the clinic should have detected that her ID was false and thus notified her parents, who, Mosley believes, would have talked her out of the abortion.
Questionable Judgments: In a decision hailed by animal-rights activists, District of Columbia judge Frederick Weisberg in July sentenced John Hardy, 49, to prison for assaults he committed during a domestic altercation, which broke out when Hardy and his wife were scuffling and ended when Hardy's pit bull became excited, provoking Hardy to fatally stab him. Weisberg sentenced Hardy to three months for assaulting his wife and 24 months for the attack on the dog.
People Different From Us: Linda Henning, 48, went on trial for murder in Albuquerque in September, charged as being the dupe and accomplice of cancer-curing, 2,000-year-old guru Diazien Hossencofft in the murder of his wife, the late Girly Chew Hossencofft. Henning was described by longtime friends as exceptionally level-headed, right up until the day she met the charismatic Hossencofft, after which she became "crazy as a loon," according to one, in that she believed that reptilian aliens were ready to take over the world, using cryogenic pods. (She wrote that reptilian George W. Bush maintains his human visage through "the use of magnetic fields to create holograms.") Hossencofft has since come clean about his frauds, but Henning apparently continues to believe.
Also, in the Last Month: Researchers writing in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine reported that putting duct tape over a wart for six days makes the wart easier to remove than does the standard practice of freezing it.
Send your Weird News to newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.newsoftheweird.com.(c) 2002 CHUCK SHEPHERD
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