Assorted Criminal Stupidity
- This item claims that a suspected shoplifter in Florida "led police on a six-hour chase" on October 3, but that's a little misleading because they weren't following her. Unless you count standing around waiting for her to fall out of the ceiling. The woman had been in the Big Lots store for several hours, which isn't suspicious at all, and then barricaded herself in a restroom. When a manager finally got inside, she noticed a tile missing from the ceiling. The six-hour "chase" followed.
- Six hours in the ceiling is kind of impressive, given that a California man only managed to elude police for two hours after fleeing into a four-acre corn maze. The man was suspected of violating a restraining order, and bolted across a highway and into the maze when officers came looking for him. "I've been to that maze myself, off duty with kids," explained one officer, apparently feeling the need to clarify that he didn't frequent corn mazes while on duty. "It's a great place to hide." And, in fact, they didn't find him in the maze, but in a nearby chicken coop.
- Cf. "Family Lost in Corn Maze Calls 911," Lowering the Bar (Oct. 12, 2011).
- Looks like cocaine floats, at least if it's in big bales wrapped in plastic. This explains how three smugglers survived seven hours in shark-infested waters after their boat capsized off the coast of Colombia. It might also explain why they didn't get attacked by sharks, but I don't really know.
- "Woman claims adopted girl she abandoned was really an adult dwarf who wanted to kill her family" is definitely the sort of headline you see every day. The woman and her husband have been charged with felony neglect of a dependent, because according to this report and the probable cause affidavit to which it links, the girl was probably a minor when her adoptive parents left her in an apartment and moved to Canada in 2016. A pretrial hearing is set for November 11.
- Perhaps you think that story sounds weird, but if so, you haven't read this opening sentence yet: "A Florida woman freed herself from a camel by biting its testicles at the Tiger Truck Stop last week after she crawled into the animal's pen to retrieve her dog and the camel sat on her, authorities said." An investigation cleared the camel of any wrongdoing, saying it had been "provoked," and the couple were cited for a leash law violation and criminal trespassing.
- The Advocate ran a followup item with the headline, "After woman bites Tiger Truck Stop camel, animal given precautionary antibiotics," which is also pretty good.
- Oh, Rudy Giuliani butt-dialed an NBC News reporter and somehow left what may be incriminating messages on the reporter's answering machine. "We need a few hundred thousand," Giuliani can be heard telling an unidentified man. (It was the second time Giuliani had butt-dialed the reporter.) The president said he wasn't concerned about Giuliani, praising him as a "great gentleman" who "looks for corruption wherever he goes," which may be true, but maybe not in the way Trump meant it.
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