Police in the Ibaraki prefecture north of Tokyo arrested a 70-year-old man in April after the manager of a 7-Eleven reported that the man had menaced him with a chainsaw. The would-be customer apparently came to the store every day only to read from various magazines for sale, and after several hours, the manager finally ordered him to leave. The man returned a short time later with the chainsaw, cranked it up, and shouted, “I’ll cut you to pieces.” He then laid it down and resumed reading and was still reading when police arrived.
FINE POINTS OF THE LAW
A female guard at a New York state juvenile detention center was raped, beaten and kidnapped at knifepoint in 2004 by one of the inmates, who escaped with the guard in a car and remained at large until he was recaptured six hours later, but when the guard applied for union insurance payments, she was informed that the contract paid kidnapping benefits only for incidents of at least eight hours’ duration. According to a March Albany Times Union story, she received worker compensation and about $10,000 in other benefits, but if she had remained captive for two more hours, she would have received between $40,000 and $100,000 more.
YES, MY FAULT
Michelle Srun, 34, testifying for leniency for her accused-rapist husband in a Montgomery County, Md., court in March, said she must be partly responsible for his attacks on several underage girls, in that she belittled and abused him for years with her overbearing personality and had multiple affairs during their marriage—six simultaneously during one stretch. Unimpressed, the judge gave her husband 27 years.
COMPELLING EXPLANATION
Simon Hamilton, 35, admitted in Canterbury (England) Crown Court in April that he took furtive “upskirt” photos of women standing in public places and even acknowledged having an extensive collection, but he denied that the pictures gave him sexual gratification. Rather, he said, he was merely a habitual collector of things and spent his time cataloguing the photos rather than looking at them. “It was the sort of gratification of a job well done,” he explained, telling the judge that he came from a long family line of collectors. Besides, Hamilton said, his upskirt days ended around 2001, when he decided to re-enter the practice of law and realized that upskirt photography was “no longer … appropriate.” At press time, no verdict had been reported.
ADVENTURES WITH CASH REGISTERS
The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, reporting in March on recidivist-robber Eugene Rutledge, 21, found that employees at one Taco Bell were so accustomed to Rutledge’s robbing them that as soon as he appeared at the door, they would ritually open the cash register for him. And in Denver in April, a man tried to rob a Walgreen’s drugstore, but a clerk resisted and, during a scuffle, grabbed the first thing at his disposal to throw at the man, and it happened to be the store’s cash drawer. The robber eagerly gathered up the loose money, fled, and according to police is still at large.
LATEST CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
A three-year study at the PET Center at Arhus Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark, reported in March, affirmed that the designer drug Ecstasy can cause depression in pigs. MTW
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