Bright ideas: Kenny Borger survived a one-car crash in upstate New York on May 1, but his passenger was killed, and Borger decided to surreptitiously bring the body home to Hamilton, N.J., in the damaged car and then figure out what to do next. What he decided was to commandeer a backhoe one night from a previous employer, scoop up the body, drive it about five miles out of town, dig a 13-foot-deep hole with the backhoe, and bury the body. He was later arrested and charged with tampering with evidence. Said Mercer County prosecutor Joseph Bocchini Jr., describing Borger's plan, "I couldn't make this stuff up."
Can't possibly be true: Clermont, Fla., police 911 dispatcher Lorraine Stanton was fired in May as the result of bad performance reviews, not even counting an incident last weekend. A woman called to report a street gathering that included a man wanted by police, but according to the 911 tape, Stanton was not helpful: "OK, that person would have to come to the police station, and we would have to check. When they come in, they'd have to bring ID." When the caller asked why a wanted man might voluntarily turn himself in, Stanton replied, "Ma'am, that's the only way we can check."Officials investigating an explosion (which killed three inmates and wounded 15) inside Villa Hermosa prison in Cali, Colombia, in May, concluded, using the process of elimination, that the only way the grenade could have gotten into the facility was to have been smuggled in by a certain unnamed female visitor earlier that day. According to a Reuters News Service dispatch, authorities concluded that she must have hidden the grenade in a body cavity because that's the only place guards are not allowed to search.
Unclear on the concept: In Denver in May, a 13-year-old girl, who was sometimes taunted by classmates because she has a small right arm and leg from cerebral palsy, was threatened with a knife and had her hair set on fire by a seventh-grade boy. But after the incident was reported, officials at Martin Luther King Middle School sent her home for the rest of the school year (for her protection, they said) while the boy remained in class. (The school's interim principal admitted several days later that her staff had botched the investigation.)
Creme de la weird: China Daily reported in May that businessman Hu Xilm, who claims that a housefly in the food 10 years ago ruined a big business deal for him, has since spent thousands of dollars on an obsession to eliminate as many flies as he can; with help from a team of volunteers he recruited, he claims to have killed 8 million. And in May, white supremacist Karleana Zuber was arrested in Kootenai County, Idaho, and charged with spitting in a state trooper's face; Zuber was isolated from the other inmates for her protection because in her not-too-distant past, before surgery, she was a male white supremacist.
Second thoughts: Serena Prasad, 22, got into a fight with her boyfriend in Turlock, Calif., on May 2 and allegedly stabbed him several times in the chest, but seeing that he was injured, put him into her car and headed for the hospital. According to a police account, while she was stopped en route at a traffic light, she realized that her boyfriend had not had enough yet, and she walked around to the passenger side, stabbed him again in the shoulder with a steak knife, and kicked him in the head, but police happened by, and she was arrested on a charge of attempted murder.
2004 CHUCK SHEPHERD