Lead Stories
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Late one evening in December, Miami resident Edna Benson heard someone knocking on her door and grabbed her Taurus 85 handgun to see who it was. Her visitor was Mayor Xavier Suarez, who Benson said “looked mad, really, really mad” and was clutching the four-page letter she had written criticizing him for firing the police chief. After she shouted at him, Suarez finally walked away. Suarez later said he tries to call everyone who writes him but he didn’t have Benson’s phone number.
In November in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Kenneth J. Nowicki, 34, was formally charged with disorderly conduct following his arrest in August. According to the police complaint, Nowicki targeted three kids he’d seen in a park and left them candy, a cup, and typewritten instructions asking them to spit into the cup after consuming the candy. He told police he is preoccupied with saliva and uses it for sexual gratification.
In October the German news agency Deutsche Presse Agentur reported the introduction of a “letter bomb” toy in stores in the Philippines, the advertising for which urges kids to “have fun and become a terrorist.” Instructions on the toy, which resembles an airmail envelope, say to write the target’s name on it, clap on it heavily to make it expand, and then present it to the victim within seven seconds so it will “explode” in his hand.
Unclear on the Concept
A 38-year-old man passed away in Jenkins Township, Pennsylvania, in November, a couple of hours after going to the home of a friend to see his snakes. According to the friend, the man had playfully reached into a cobra’s tank, picked up the snake, and was bitten. Refusing a ride to the hospital, the man said, “I’m a man, I can handle it,” and instead went to a bar, where he had three drinks and bragged to patrons that he had just been bitten by a cobra. An hour later he was dead.
