Curses, Foiled Again
Police charged Dennis Lottig, 30, with stealing four security cameras from a bank drive-through in St. Albans, W.Va. The evidence against him, the Daily Mail reported, was video tapes of him stealing the cameras, taken by the cameras.
• Sheriff’s deputies charged Jonathan G. Parker, 19, with breaking into a home in Berkeley County, W.Va., after the victim noticed he used her computer to check his Facebook account but forgot to log out before leaving the home with two diamond rings.
To the Rescue
Responding to a 911 call that a man was bleeding from the face near a fire station in St. Petersburg, Fla., two firefighters jumped into a rescue unit, opened the garage bay door and pulled forward. They promptly ran over the man they were rushing to help, Ted Allen Lenox, 41, who lay outside the station’s garage bays. “They couldn’t see him in front of the truck” because they were too close, fire rescue Lt. Joel Granata told the St. Petersburg Times, which said Lenox was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.
App for That
Authorities charged Donald Goodrich, 38, with menacing an Apple Store employee in Cincinnati because he was frustrated that his iPhone wasn’t working properly. WCPO News reported Goodrich told the employee he “was so mad he could pop a 9 mm at it” and then opened his shirt and showed her the handgun.
• A new iPhone application lets users send prayers to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site. The price of “Send a Prayer Western Wall” was reduced to 99 cents to promote its use in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Senders use their iPhone or iTouch to compose the prayers, which are printed out within 48 hours and placed between the stones of the wall.
Too Green for His Own Good
A British town council fined a bicycle shop owner for failing to produce any commercial waste. The Daily Mail reported that Mark Howard, 50, reuses any surplus materials he can and sells any he can’t for scrap. When the Southend Council waste contractor noticed Howard wasn’t having any waste collected, the council refused to believe that he didn’t have any waste to dispose and fined him 180 pounds ($285). “This is totally stupid,” Howard told the paper. “I’m not some environmental fruitcake trying to save the world. I’m just an ordinary person using my brain to avoid waste. But they don’t seem to care.”
Second-Amendment Follies
Police in Miamisburg, Ohio, locked down an elementary school after a report of a shooting in the vicinity, even though students were off that day. Neighbors initially said someone was running around the area firing a gun, but police determined that a man who lives nearby accidentally shot himself in the hand while cleaning his gun.
• Four days after Ralph Needs, 80, was pistol-whipped during a home invasion in Groveport, Ohio, he was learning to fire a gun to defend himself when he was shot in the hand as one of his sons was loading the 9 mm pistol.
• James Looney, 40, accidentally shot himself in the head while teaching firearms safety to his girlfriend in Imperial, Mo. Witnesses said Looney was demonstrating the different safety mechanisms on several guns and would put the gun to his head and ask his girlfriend if she thought the gun would fire, then pull the trigger. KSDK-TV reported the safety mechanism worked for the first two guns but not the third.
Compiled from the nation’s press by Roland Sweet. Authentication on demand. Submit items, citing date and source, to P.O. Box 8130, Alexandria VA 22306.