NEWS & BLUES

Curses, Foiled Again

Authorities charged Carl Muggli, 49, with murdering his wife in Ray, Minn., despite his insistence that the 17-foottall totem pole the two were carving slipped out of its cradle and fell on her accidentally. Investigators became suspicious when they found Facebook entries, which the criminal complaint described as “very intimate in nature,” between Muggli and a Texas woman around the time of Linda Muggli’s death. The officers went to the Mugglis’ home to re-create the circumstances of her death. After failing five times to topple the totem pole the way Muggli described, sheriff’s deputies arrested him. (Minneapolis Star Tribune) James Edward Russell, 39, escaped from the Washington state penitentiary but was recaptured the next day when he knocked on the door of a cabin, still wearing his prison uniform, and asked to use the phone. Department of Corrections official Chad Lewis said the man who answered the door was an off-duty guard at the prison Russell had fled and recognized him. (Associated Press)

Sex Is Its Own Punishment

A 39-year-old woman was injured when a tombstone at Ahavath Israel Cemetery in Hamilton, N.J., fell on her leg while she and a male companion were engaged in what police Capt. James Stevens termed “extracurricular activities.” (Trenton’s The Times)

Second-Amendment Follies

Three tourists watching an Old West gun battle in Hill City, S.D., were wounded when a 49-year-old re-enactor fired live ammunition instead of blanks. One of the victims, Carroll Knutson, 65, said she was disappointed that the injury cut short her vacation but relieved that it was a performer who fired the shots rather than one of the 100 tourists watching the show. (Associated Press)

If England Had a Second Amendment

When security guard Sean Murphy, 38, used a stolen shotgun to remove a wart, the blast also removed his left middle finger. “There was nothing left, so no chance to reattach it,” Murphy said when pleading  guilty in Doncaster, England, to using an illegal firearm, adding, “The best thing is that the wart has gone.” District Judge Jonathan Bennett gave Murphy a 16-week suspended sentence, telling him, “I don’t know what was going on in your mind.” (Yorkshire Post)

Definitionally Challenged

New York’s Court of Appeals ruled that Margaret Groninger couldn’t sue the village of Mamaroneck after she fell on ice in its parking lot because the village neither caused the ice nor received prior notice about it. In her appeal, Groninger noted that state law lists only six municipal locations requiring advance notice of defects:

sidewalks, crosswalks, streets, highways, bridges and culverts. Four of the court’s judges said the village parking lot counts as a highway for “functional purpose,” while the three dissenting judges declared the statement to be so obviously untrue “as hardly to merit serious discussion.” (Associated Press)

Guilty Bystanders

After Raymond Zack, 53, walked into the ocean in Alameda, Calif., intent on killing himself, he stood up to his neck in the frigid surf 150 yards offshore for more than an hour while at least 10 police and firefighters stood on the shore, with about 75 beachgoers, watching until he eventually drowned. “We’re not trained to go into the water,” police Lt. Joe McNiff said. Fire Chief Ricci Zombeck, noting that budget constraints prevent the fire department from recertifying its firefighters in land-based water rescues, said, “If I was off duty, I would know what I would do,” but he added that his on-duty response was to stay “within our policies and procedures” to avoid opening the city to liability. Firefighters wouldn’t even go into the water to retrieve Zack’s body, instead waiting until a woman in her 20s volunteered to swim out and bring the body back to the beach. At a packed city council meeting after the incident, Alameda residents declared they had lost faith in their first responders. (San Francisco’s KGO-TV)

Culinary Adventures

Following the National Transportation Safety Board’s conclusion that Canada geese caused the forced landing of a U.S. Airways jet in the Hudson River by getting caught in its engine during takeoff, New York City announced plans to capture geese flocking around LaGuardia and Kennedy airports and send them to Pennsylvania to be cooked to feed the poor. “Rather than disposing of them in landfills, we wanted to make sure they do not go to waste,” an official of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection said. (Reuters) Fifteen percent of British consumers responding to a survey admitted serving dinner guests food that had fallen on the floor, and 10 percent knowingly served them food well past its sell-by date. Another 13 percent said they had accidentally poisoned themselves and their guests with their cooking. According to the poll commissioned by Italian pasta maker Giovanni Rana, 5 percent of the respondents admitted defrosting food by using irons, hairdryers, tanning beds and other alternative heat-generating appliances. (Reuters)

When Guns Are Outlawed

A woman robbed a bank in Longmont, Colo., of an undisclosed amount of cash by threatening to infect the teller with AIDS if she didn’t hand over the money. Police official Jeff Satur said the woman, between 55 and 75, coughed frequently into a blue bandana during the holdup. (Reuters) When a 44-year-old man answered the door of his home in Stafford, Va., a man wielding a chain saw came at him. The resident went back inside and closed the door, but the man with the chain saw broke into the home and chased the resident, who defended himself with an aluminum baseball bat, hitting his attacker in the head and jabbing him in the midsection. The attacker fled but was later arrested and identified as Douglas Edward Turner, 31, according to Stafford Sheriff’s Maj. David Decatur, who explained the attacker was upset with the resident about a woman. (Fredericksburg Freelance-Star)

News and Blues is compiled from the nation’s press. To contribute, submit original clippings, citing date and source, to Roland Sweet in care of The New Times.