Weird News: Volume Two
PASTORAL WEIRD
- The Reverend Glen Summerford was convicted in February of attempted murder of his wife in Scottsboro, Alabama. A jury found that he had forced his wife to stick her hand into a cage of rattlesnakes (which he handles in his services at his Church of Jesus With Following Signs in addition to drinking strychnine and touching live electrical wires), saying that she had to die because he wanted to marry another woman. Much of the trial testimony concerned which of the spouses had sinned or "backslid" more. (While Summerford was in jail, his inadequately supervised parishioner, Clyde Crossfield, was bitten on both hands by a rattlesnake he was handling.)
SUE `EM ALL!!
- Scott D. Carpenter, 27, filed a lawsuit in September against the management company of Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and its chief concessionaire because they allowed him to buy too many beers during a 1989 Steelers game and then failed to warn him about the danger of riding on escalator handrails, on which he was injured in a drunken fall.
- In Tacoma, Washington, Christine Lauritzen filed a lawsuit against her husband, Bret, last year for negligence that subjected her to injury. Bret's error was in ignoring Christine's driving instructions: During a visit to Miami, Florida, they wound up in a bad section of town, where they were eventually robbed and where she suffered a severe arm injury.
- A newspaper in Ireland reported in February that 38 Irish soccer fans recently won a lawsuit against two bus companies that had caused them to miss the 1990 World Cup games in Italy. They sued because the bus drivers drove too slowly (an average of 20 mph) on two trips, causing them to miss one game and to miss a scheduled ferry that would have transported them to another game.
- Takashi Nakayama, 25, filed a lawsuit in December in a court in Niigata, Japan, against his mother and grandmother, seeking about $1,548 in damages because his grandmother had thrown out his comic-book collection without his consent and his mother had failed to stop her.
POLITICOS FROM HELL
- Magoo Dorcy, 42, announced his candidacy for mayor of Dover, Delaware, despite having pleaded guilty in Columbus, Ohio, three years ago for molesting a 5 year old girl.
- Harold W. "Tony" Glacken was charged last year with running a fraudulent auto-inspection scheme. Upon announcing his candidacy for sheriff in St Louis, Missouri, recently, Glacken said, "I just decided it was time I get involved and get this community straightened out. I'm tired of all the [county's] bad publicity."
- In Salem, Oregon, former Baptist minister Joe Lutz withdrew from the U.S. Senate race in January, saying that his "family values" campaign had lost credibility because he had abandoned his wife to marry another woman and reportedly was $2,000 behind in child support payments.
- Donald L. Traxler, newly installed mayor of Ada, Ohio, and education professor at Ohio Northern University, declared in December that he would take office later in the month, as scheduled, despite his December 13 arrest when rangers observed him masturbating at a local park.
- Sherman T. Miller, running for sheriff in Van Buren County in southeastern Iowa, was jailed in March, suspected by authorities to be part of a burglary ring that had been stealing farm equipment. Said Miller, "It's just a bunch of political nonsense to take me out of the race."
- Poin Adams, candidate for sheriff in Amarillo, Texas, was found guilty in 1990 of fraud for tampering with his vehicle inspection sticker. He had crudely drawn a "1" on his windshield, to obscure the "0" in 1990, so that his sticker would appear to be valid in 1991.
OH RAMI, GET REAL JOB!!
- On October 12, a clerk on duty at a convenience store in Abilene, Texas, was persuaded by a man to accept a $100 bill that was accurately printed (1950 series) in every detail -- except that it was 12 inches long and 5 inches wide.
REAL WEIRD
- Last fall, two men holed up in the Maine State Library in Augusta for two months in makeshift living quarters that a security official said included "everything you could think of," before they were discovered. Andre V. Jatho, 20, was charged with burglary, but the other man moved out. For sustenance, the two men had looted various state supply rooms (taking an unusually large quantity of pudding).
