During the past week there have been a number of crimes committed that can best be described as, well, bizarre, from locations in the U.S., Malaysia, and Australia. Here is a digest of sorts of a few of them in which the criminals, and in one of the cases a victim, seemed to straddle the line that separates the stupid from the moronic.
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Out of Cleveland, Tennessee, located near Chattanooga, a man attempting to enter the courtrooms area of the Bradley County Justice Center on Monday, May 12, 2008, was stopped at the security area and asked to empty the contents of his pockets into a plastic container before being allowed to continue into one of the courtrooms. According to Sheriff Tim Gobble, the man allegedly included a small amount of marijuana and rolling papers among the items he placed into the plastic container for inspection. When security personnel questioned him about it, he fled the building but was captured by police only minutes later. He faces charges of carrying contraband into a penal institution and evading capture. Certainly not the sharpest tool in the shed....
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Another dullard, this time from down under, was pulled over while driving an unregistered and uninsured car on Friday, May 9, 2008, in Alice Springs, Australia, located in the central part of the country. Constable Wayne Burnett said that he was "shocked and appalled" when he observed a case of beer seat-buckled between two adults sitting in the car's back seat while a child sat unrestrained on the floor beneath the 30 cans of beer.
"The child was sitting in the lump in the center, unrestrained," Burnett said. "I haven't ever seen something like this before. This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child."
The driver was fined the equivalent of $710 and was admonished for not having the child buckled up in a moving vehicle.
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In the eastern state of Terengganu, Malaysia, a 36-year-old housewife was asleep when a naked man slipped quietly under the sheets and into bed with her in the middle of the night recently. Although she stirred slightly, the woman did not immediately awaken. A short time later, however, the woman did wake up and spoke to the man. She became suspicious when he responded and his voice had not sounded like her husband's. In reality, the man that had been mistaken for the woman's husband was a thief that had broken into the couples' home.
"She then went to another room and found her husband fast asleep on the couch," said the cop who took the report. "That's when she screamed, causing the thief to flee by leaping out of the window with the stolen items."
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Lastly, on Thursday, May 8, 2008, authorities in Harris County, Texas revealed that they had filed misdemeanor abuse of corpse charges against two men who allegedly dug up an old grave in an abandoned cemetery and removed the skull from the skeletal remains. Afterwards, according to the story that they told the police after their arrest, they smoked marijuana and used the skull as a makeshift bong. The police located the grave that had been disturbed and, as of this week, were still investigating this very strange case while others pondered what a monumental task it must have been, with all of the holes in a skull, to have used it as a smoking device.
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