xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In October, U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger, 76, R-N.C., told the Charlotte Observer that a large part of the stress that ended his 50-year marriage was the entry into the couple’s Washington, D.C., neighborhood of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to a building just across the street from the couple’s townhouse, which is three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Ballenger called CAIR a fund-raising arm of the terrorist group Hezbollah and said he and his wife were terrified at seeing women “wearing hoods” (perhaps meaning headscarves), moving boxes into the building: “(T)hey could blow (the Capitol) up.”
Ten days after Jonathon Russell killed three people and himself in a highly publicized workplace-rage incident in Jefferson City, Mo., in July, his mother, Nina Tichelkamp-Russell, filed a worker compensation claim on his behalf, seeking death benefits. Her version of the cause of death, according to what she wrote on the claim, was “by gunfire while on the company clock.” (The employer and its insurance company rejected the claim.)
LaFayre Marie Banks, 32, was charged with assault and child abuse in Port Huron, Mich., in May after her 7-month-old baby fell from Banks’ second-story bathroom window, suffering severe head injuries. Banks told a police officer that she was bathing the child when “it reared up and went through the window.”
In Wetumpka, Ala., in August, Melissa Wright, 27, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for putting her 18-month-old daughter in a hot oven. Wright’s version was that the child slipped from her arms, fell to the floor, and rolled into the oven, and then the door closed.
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Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD