xxxNews Of The Weirdxxx
Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.
In September during the annual, vituperative Miami-Dade County (Fla.) budget hearing, Commissioner Natacha Seijas snapped at Chairwoman Gwen Margolis for interrupting her: “You’re going to leave here in a body bag if you keep this up.”
In June (according to telephone records obtained by the Tulsa World newspaper), Oklahoma State Rep. Chad Stites angrily told a Tulsa official whose department was badgering him about code violations on Stites’ property that he would “neuter you sons of a (sic) bitches.”
In September, Robert Rozenhart, now 56, won his 7-year-old lawsuit against Skier’s Sportshop (Edmonton, Alberta) for injuries suffered on his maiden attempt to in-line skate, which came after a Skier’s employee tried unsuccessfully to tell Rozenhart not to venture out until the store’s instructor arrived to help him. Rozenhart skated away anyway, and was on a downward incline when he first realized he did not know how to stop.
In October, Kevin William Presland, 44, commenced his lawsuit against the James Fletcher Hospital in Newcastle, Australia, in which he is asking to be financially compensated because, he said, hospital personnel released him prematurely after a brief psychiatric admission in 1995 and thus made it easy for him to kill his prospective sister-in-law a few hours later. Presland’s lawyer acknowledges that nothing can be done to help the woman’s family but says Presland, at least, deserves a payoff. The hospital says Presland was calm and rational and that it had no legal basis for detaining him.
And University of Pennsylvania researchers found that the average price of a black-market human kidney in India has dropped (despite insufficient supply) from the equivalent of (U.S.) $1,603 to $975, suggesting that wealthier, kidney-needing people have learned how to put the squeeze on impoverished donors.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd
NEWS OF THE WEIRD
