Raleigh, N.C., judge Don Overby, in several recent cases involving juvenile theft, has forced the convicted kid to go home, retrieve his own most prized possession, bring it back to Overby's courtroom, and watch while the judge smashes it up.
San Francisco police arrested Russell C. Sultan in July and charged him with attempting to extort $23,000 from his mother and girlfriend by claiming to have been kidnapped for ransom.
After tracing telephone calls, police, guns drawn, burst into a motel room to find Sultan casually eating fried chicken and watching a 49ers football game.
Sultan said the kidnappers had merely left him alone for a while, and exclaimed to the officers:
- What took you so long?
Long Beach police arrested two small, skinny men in October and charged them with stealing six 45-pound barbells from the Buffum-Downtown YMCA.
The men were struggling to keep the barbells in a small cart that kept tipping over because they were not strong enough to steer it.
Rhett Jacobs, Democratic candidate for the South Carolina House and a man who listed "education" as his top priority, submitted a required campaign disclosure form in October, handwritten, on which he detailed expenses for "filling fee," "campain work" and "litature."
Richard Kyle won his Arizona House seat in November more easily than he had won the Republican primary in September. He and his primary opponent, John Gaylord, had tied and had agreed to settle things with one hand of five-card stud dealt by the speaker of the Arizona House.
Kyle's pair of sevens put him into the general election.
Michael J. Schmidt, 29, set up a hidden video camera at his home near Superior, Wis., because he had been burglarized several times and thought he could catch the culprits in the act.
The burglars came back and were captured on tape, which Schmidt turned over to the sheriff.
Among the items the burglars took from Schmidt's house was a box containing eight marijuana plants.
Schmidt was charged with misdemeanor drug possession.
In October, a cleaning crew accidentally tossed out an exhibit at the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The exhibit consisted of 14,000 cigarette butts -- the amount a smoker produces in a lifetime -- crammed into coffee cans. Said the artist, in defense of the cleaning crew, "(The butts) didn't smell very good."
Three maintenance workers in Alexandria, Ind., fixed a massive street-flooding problem in October when they pulled a 200-pound hairball from a manhole. Said one of the men, "We thought we had a goat."
In October, the Swallows Hotel in Gateshead, England, offered 11 chronic snorers a free night's stay so they it could test how well soundproofed the rooms are. The hotel staff tape-recorded the sounds coming from the rooms and promised the loudest snorer a prize.
After police pulled over Kevin Temple, 35, in a routine traffic stop in Bronson, Fla., in October, a police dog sniffing the trunk became agitated. In the trunk and back seat, officers found the following live animals: 48 rattlesnakes, a Gila monster, 45 non-poisonous snakes, 67 scorpions, several tarantulas and small lizards, and a parrot. Temple said they were just pets.
