Curses, foiled again
While police were driving burglary suspect Kylen English, 20, to the Montgomery County, Ohio, jail, he began banging his head against the car’s rear passenger window when crossing a bridge. “The officer starts to pull over,” Dayton police Lt. Kim Hill recounted, “and once he pulled over, the suspect had the window broken. He then went head-first out the window and head-first over the bridge.” The cruiser was roughly midway across the bridge, but the river flows beneath only a third of the span. English fell 30 feet onto a dry, rocky area and was pronounced dead. (Dayton Daily News) When a gunman demanded money from Fred and Julie Kemp in Boynton Beach, Fla., Fred Kemp, 63, pushed the gun away, provoking the robber to pistol whip him in the head. “I reacted from there,” the 5- foot-7, 150-pound former wrestler said. “I footsweeped him down,” then maneuvered him into a “sleeper hold” until he began to lose consciousness and dropped the weapon. Kemp held the robber down until police arrived and arrested Richard Nowling, 41. (South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
Litigation nation
After graduating at the top of her class at McGehee High School, Kymberly Wimberly, 18, is suing the Arkansas school for racial discrimination because it named a white student with a lower grade point average as her co-valedictorian. Wimberly, who took Advanced Placement and honors courses and maintained the top GPA, even after she gave birth to a daughter during her junior year, said her mother, who works at the school, overheard school officials say they wanted to avoid the “big mess” of having her as valedictorian. (ABC News) The husband of Diane Schuler, who killed eight people, including herself, while driving a minivan the wrong way on a highway for two miles while under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, is suing the State of New York because he insisted it didn’t keep the road safe and failed to provide signs warning against driving the wrong way. (Cortlandt’s The Daily Cortlandt)
Incendiary devices
About a dozen Brigham Young University students suffered burns while dropping homemade gasoline bombs down a mineshaft in Utah County, Utah, when their fuel container accidentally spilled and caught fire. Sheriff’s deputies pointed out that the area in the Tintic mining district is a popular spot for college students to play with fire. (Salt Lake City’s KSL-TV) Joseph P. Williamson, 31, was checking for sugar in the gas tank of his girlfriend’s car in Pinellas County, Fla., by siphoning gas with a leaf blower. Sheriff’s official Tom Nestor said a spark from the blower caused an explosion that seriously burned Williamson. (Tampa- St. Petersburg’s Bay News 9)
Compiled from the nation’s press by Roland Sweet. Authentication on demand.
