Lead Stories
Linda Wallace, a former resident of Rocky River, Ohio, who during two years there was the object of a dozen neighborhood noise complaints, filed a second trillion-dollar lawsuit against the city in September, this time because she says officials insulted her son; two weeks earlier she had sued a town police officer for a trillion dollars charging false arrest.
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Several Los Angeles contractors petitioned a court in July to restrict lawyer Robert W. Hirsh from filing lawsuits because of the 82 personal lawsuits he has initiated in 18 years against his home contractors, his clients, his brokers, the hotels and restaurants he frequents, his synagogue, his insurance companies, and his former employers. Said Hirsh, “I’m not going to be a patsy.”
Good Sports
Too clever for their own good: In Akron, Ohio, a ten-year-old boy hiding from his mother in a pile of leaves he had just raked was hospitalized in October with minor injuries after his mother drove over the leaves in the family’s minivan. Four days earlier, near Ashby, Minnesota, a teenage boy playing a prank put some logs across a road just to make a relative have to stop and remove them in order to drive on; however, the driver chose instead to go around the logs, accidentally running over the boy, who was hiding in the grass. He also had to be hospitalized.
A 41-year-old Air Force Reserve pilot was killed near Tulia, Texas, in August; he lost control of his F-16 when, while showing off for his in-laws, he accidentally clipped his father-in-law’s barn. A 32-year-old man riding atop a tractor-trailer was killed on Interstate 26 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in September when he was wiped out by an overpass. And a 29-year-old man driving in a Ventura County, California, recreation area in his off-road vehicle was killed in October; he was using a flashlight to substitute for his failed headlights when he accidentally drove over a cliff.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Shawn Belschwender.
