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True Crazy News Stories
The following are actual news stories as printed in various news papers in the US:Eugene "Butch" Flenough, Jr., was arrested in Austin, Texas for robbery of a pizza restaurant after employees identified him. To hide his face during the robbery, Flenough wore a motorcycle helmet, which had "Butch" and "Eugene Flenough, Jr." written on it.
When the Army tested a new air defense gun called the Sergeant York, which was designed to home in on the whirling blades of helicopters and propeller-driven aircraft, it ignored the chopper targets. Instead, the weapon demolished a ventilating fan on a nearby latrine.
In Oslo, Norway, Jermund Skogstad, fifty, was moving into his new apartment when he took a break to get something to eat. He went to a nearby cafe but forgot to take his wallet, which contained his new address. He was unable to find his way home. "This is embarrassing," he told a newspaper a month later, hoping word of his plight would reach his new landlady, whom he had paid a month's rent in advance.
The New York State Lottery had to suspend play on the number 3569 before noon on December 27, 1989, because it had been played by too many people. This was the number of the license plate (VR3569) on the truck New York Yankees manager Billy Martin was killed in days earlier.
The government of China executed twelve male and six female factory managers by firing squad at a refrigerator plant just outside Beijing in 1989 because the poor quality of their products constituted "unpardonable crimes against the people of China." Customers had complained for years about having to wait for refrigerators that were usually unusable when delivered.
In Duluth Minnesota, carpenter Lanace Grangruth accidentally shot a nail an inch and a half into his head from his nail gun, tacking his cap to his head. Said Grangruth, "I didn't actually feel it go in. I tried to take my had off, and it wouldn't come off." The nail penetrataed relatively harmlessly at a crevasse between the two lobes.
Darrel Brown, 53, was convicted of defrauding the Veterans Administration of more than $700,000 by feigning paralysis for more than twenty years. He had been faithfully reporting to VA facilities during that time in a wheelchair after having bound his arms and legs tightly for days before visits so they would temporarily atrophy.
Shirley Koota, 62, of Miami, accompanied her husband Bert, 65, to a pistol range to learn how to use ther new .22 automatic. During the lesson, she squeezed off a round, and the hot cartridge, ejected by the pistol, flew down the front of her dress. It startled her so badly that she whirled around and shot Bert in the leg.
Derrick Johnson, 28, who allegedly stole food over a period of three months from a Kansas City gas station cooler while yelling "Catch me if you think you can," was shot and killed by a station clerk.
Two men, aged 16 and 18, after an attempted burglary in Larkspur, CA, in 1989, scaled a chain-link fence outside town to evade police who were following them, only to discover later that the fence was the outer perimiter of San Quentin Prison, where guards soon arrested them.
1990 New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Pierre Rinfret had some difficulty establishing voter name recognition. A New York Times informal survey of voters identified Pierre Rinfret as an artist, a perfume, a drug dealer, a movie star, a fashion designer, a chef, the French ambassador to the United States, and a goalie for the New York Rangers.
Chef Albert Grabham of the New House Hotel in Wales hid the restaurant's New Year's Eve earnings in the oven. He failed to remember that when he lit the same oven to prepare New Year's Day lunch.
A transient unable to leave a tip for a waitress at a Salt Lake City restaurant told her, "I'm going to go rob a bank and I'll be right back." Police arrested him after he walked out of the First Interstate Bank with $1200 and walked back across the street to leave a $2 tip.
Eighteen-year-old Ronald Kramer of East Wenatchee, Washington, was arrested along with three friends after they got drunk, dug up a body in a cemetary, and took it to the home of a friend in the middle of the night as a joke. The body was at least seventy years old.