Dateline: RussiaA Siberian man is refusing to pay a traffic fine because he says the world is going to end in December anyway. The Kemerovo city website in eastern Siberia reported the unnamed man had been fined 1,000 rubles (about $32) after a minor traffic accident in the summer. Instead of paying the small amount, however, the motorist filed a 10-page brief filled with charts and graphs pointing out that the Mayan calendar predicts Doomsday on Dec. 21, 2012. “However, the debtor believes that if people are kinder to each other and forgive each other’s debts, the world will not end,” a local debt collection agency said. No word on whether the court has agreed to waive the fine in order to save the world.Dateline: CanadaA judge in Ontario fined a woman $1,500 for driving with a blood-alcohol level exceeding the legal limit and then remarked on the “utter stupidity” of the officer who arrested her. Const. Robert Sparling, an eight-year veteran of the Sarnia Police Department, pulled over 21-year-old Marlee Dorinda Viggers after she crashed her pickup truck into several curbs and struck another vehicle on the night of March 6, 2011. Sparling then conducted breath alcohol tests that indicated Viggers was nearly two and a half times the legal limit. Some weeks later, Sparling and Viggers happened to be in the same Sarnia bar. The officer sent the woman a text message that read, “If you buy me a beer, I’ll forget everything at trial.” Viggers sent a return message, saying, “I wish it worked that way.” She also saved Sparling’s text and gave it to her lawyer. The messages were offered up as exhibits by the defense at Viggers’ trial last month. Justice R.G. Hunter criticized Sparling’s conduct at the bar but added there was no reason to believe the officer’s earlier alcohol test was flawed. Viggers was fined and banned from driving for one year. Sarnia police say they will investigate the matter of Const. Sparling’s behavior and deal with it internally.Dateline: FloridaA former Marine dressed in a tutu is accused of attacking a disabled vet in a wheelchair on Halloween. Christopher Dabney was arrested around 2:30 a.m. Halloween night in front of the Pita Pit restaurant in Gainesville. Police say he hit 35-year-old Daniel Priotti twice, knocking him out of his wheelchair. Witnesses said Dabney, a Marine veteran, was offended by Priotti’s “disabled vet” costume. Unfortunately, Priotti—an actual, wheelchair-bound former Marine—wasn’t in costume. According to The Gainesville Sun, Dabney has been charged with abuse of the disabled.Dateline: KentuckyA woman who shot her on-again, off-again boyfriend six times told police she was only “giving him the nose job he wanted.” Detectives in Highland Heights say Shayna Hubers, 21, shot Ryan Posten, 29, to death after an argument at his condominium on Friday, Oct. 12. Hubers called police 15 minutes after the incident and confessed to shooting him twice in the face and then four more times in the body to “stop the twitching.” According to Highland Heights Det. Bill Birkenhauer, “She said she gave him the nose job that he wanted.” Birkenhauer testified on Thursday, Oct. 25, at a preliminary hearing in Campbell County District Court. He told the court Hubers put Posten out of his misery because, “she couldn’t stand to see him deformed [after shooting him in the face]. She said he was vain.” After the hearing, Judge Karen Thomas decided to revoke Hubers’ $5 million bond and forward the case to a grand jury. Police say Hubers’ story has changed “several times” over the course of the investigation, but now claims she was protecting herself. “I’m not going to talk about the facts of the case, except to say that it is a self-defense case. The only thing she did wrong was having bad taste in men,” defense attorney Wil Zevely said of his client. “She is a very young and kind person. She would never do anything violent: never has, never would.”
Compiled by Devin D. O'Leary. Email your weird news to devin@alibi.com.
