After breaking into the same house he’d broken into eight months earlier, John Finch, 44, found himself trapped, according to police in New Castle County, Del., because the homeowner had changed the locks in the meantime so that a key was required to open the door, even from the inside.

William Pace said Johnnie Butts approached him at a grocery store in Randolph, Mass., and offered to sell him a bracelet and chain stamped as 14-karat gold for $100. Pace immediately recognized the gold was fake by its look and feel because he owns a jewelry store.

While arguing with the mother of his 4-year-old son at her apartment in St. Clair Shores, Mich., Antonio Owens, 27, “grabbed a kitchen knife and said he is going to cut the gas line and burn down the place,” police Detective James Wagner reported.

Jose Luis Ochoa, 35, died shortly after being stabbed in the leg by a razor-sharp blade attached to the leg of a rooster that attacked him at a cockfight in Lamont, Calif. Noting roosters are drugged, mutilated and have knives and razor blades attached to their legs to make them better fighters, Kern Coun.

After police investigating the shooting death of a convenience-store clerk in Pasadena, Texas, identified Michael Ray Morris, 29, as one of their two suspects, Morris returned to the crime scene to complain to a television reporter that he’d merely been a customer.

Police said two men making their getaway after an armed robbery in Orange County, Fla., tried to distract authorities from pursuing them by reporting a carjacking. The vehicle they described, however, was the same white Honda Accord they were driving.

Federal authorities said two masked gunmen greeted the owners of a New York City pizzeria arriving home after closing the store and ordered one of the owners to hand over a bag they believed held the day’s earnings. Instead, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kristie Osswald reported, it “contained pizza dough.

Shortly after receiving a call about a robbery, Ottawa police said they got a second call reporting a stabbing. Responding officers found a man in his 20s outside a store that they suspect he robbed before tripping on his way out and stabbing himself with the knife used in the robbery.

Police had little trouble identifying the masked woman who robbed a drug store in Manchester, N.H. A witness reported seeing the suspect flee the store and get into a car with vanity plates that read “B-USHER.” Police arrested Bonnie Usher, 43, at her home with stolen money.

Randy King, 53, admitted stealing an antique wrought-iron fence from a house in Duluth, Minn., after police confronted him with the evidence: the fence itself, which King had installed around his own house, a few blocks away. Officers came looking for him because the victim told them King had tried to buy her fence the month before.