Lead Stories
Bottom of the Gene Pool
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Police in Bonita Springs, Florida, charged Randall James Baker, 45, with aggravated battery in August for shooting his friend Robert Callahan in the head. A sheriff’s spokesman said Baker and Callahan had a playful tradition of trying to shoot the little buttons off the top of each other’s baseball caps. Alcohol reportedly played a role in the game.
Tony Faulks, 39, who was convicted of robbery in July in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, after police found $1,300 in marked bills in his underwear, said he doesn’t trust banks and always keeps his money down there. And Mr. Siut Cheng, attempting to get out of a speeding ticket in July while hauling a van full of lobsters, offered the New Jersey trooper five of the shellfish as a bribe. And former Nazi concentration camp guard Jack Reimer, testifying at his citizenship revocation trial in New York in August, answered charges that he fired his gun into a group of Jews in Trawniki, Poland, in 1941 by claiming that he thought they were already dead.
In June Thomas Stanley Huntington, 52, pleaded no contest to fraud in Aztec, New Mexico, in a scheme to sell “California red superworms.” Huntington had told buyers that the worms, which he sold for $125 a pound, could eat nuclear waste and that a nearby radiation-waste cleanup plant would buy all the worms they could breed.
Recurring Themes