Dateline: Florida— According to the Pensacola News Journal , Google Earth helped a sheriff’s department bust a major litterbug. Deputy Gregory Barnes used satellite images from Google Earth to hunt down the owner of an 18-foot boat which had been dumped in an undeveloped subdivision about 15 miles north of Pensacola. Authorities were able to identify a fuzzy image of the boat in question parked at Dwight Everett Foster’s house. When police questioned him, Foster admitted to dumping the old boat. The police said it would have cost Foster $18 to dispose of the vessel at a local landfill. He now faces a $5,000 fine and up to five years in prison. Dateline: Pennsylvania— Police outside Pittsburgh arrested a man for public drunkenness after witnesses said they saw him trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dead possum. Donald Wolfe, 55, was arrested on a highway northeast of Pittsburgh after several motorists saw him trying to bring the roadkill back to life. State Trooper Jamie Levier told the Philadelphia Inquirer the animal had been dead for some time. Levier was quoted in the paper as saying that Wolfe was “extremely intoxicated” at the time of his arrest and “did have his mouth in the area of the animal’s mouth, I guess.” Dateline: Minnesota— This will probably not go over well in front of a jury. A St. Paul man charged with beating up his quadruple amputee girlfriend admitted in court that he hit the woman, but only after she hit him first. According to the criminal complaint, Jacoby Laquan Smith got angry with his girlfriend, Tiesha Bell, because she blocked his view of the television in their apartment. He allegedly threw her to the floor and punched her in the face more than 10 times. Speaking in a telephone interview with the St. Paul Pioneer Press last week, Smith said the fight actually started over accusations that his wheelchair-bound girlfriend was seeing another man. “I had been dealing with her cheating on me,” Smith said. According to him, the argument escalated after he turned on the TV and she got mad. “She punched me in the groin,” Smith alleged. Despite the fact that Bell had both hands and part of both legs amputated due to a childhood illness, Smith insists she then hit him with a coffee canister, ran into him with her wheelchair and threw a bedpan at him. “It was full of pee,” he said. Smith told the newspaper that Bell has a violent temper. “She’ll swing at me and choke me with her nubs.” Smith appeared in Ramsey County District Court last Monday on charges of fifth-degree assault and interfering with a 911 call. During the hearing, Bell said she plans to marry Smith and doesn’t want him to serve jail time. “We both need anger management,” she conceded. Dateline: Utah— A man accused of stealing two cell phones from a gas station convenience store was arrested after he flagged down the investigating officer and asked for directions. Police say the officer was investigating the theft at a gas station in Orem, 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, when he was stopped by one John White and quizzed about directions to a nearby address. White matched the description a store clerk gave of the thief. The address he was asking about also turned out to be the same address the officer was searching for. The address came off a slip of paper the phone thief left behind at the gas station. White was arrested after the officer searched him and found both cell phones and a small amount of marijuana. Charges are pending. Dateline: New Mexico— A Las Cruces man has been indicted on multiple charges of criminal property damage after he was caught defecating in car he thought was his girlfriend’s—but, unfortunately for all involved, was not. The Las Cruces Sun-News reports the car’s owner left work on the night of March 11, only to find 18-year-old Austin Horries Purifoy copping a squat in the back seat of his Honda Civic. “This is your car?” Purifoy said, according to documents filed in court. “I thought this was Desiree’s car.” Purifoy then allegedly pulled up his underwear, got out of the car and ran away. The car’s owner told police that the vehicle’s right front window had been shattered with a rock. Police soon located Purifoy standing alongside a nearby ditch. Purifoy allegedly told officers he was outside because he didn’t want his “girlfriend” Desiree to see him smoking. On March 25, Purifoy was indicted by a Doña Ana County grand jury on two charges of criminal property damage and one charge of breaking and entering.
Compiled by Devin D. O'Leary. E-mail your weird news to devin@alibi.com.
