Lead Story
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Already on probation for a 2005 child-endangerment conviction, 20-year-old Shawn Mohan was arrested in January near Saint Peters, Missouri, for allegedly shooting his 12-day-old son at least five times with a BB gun. According to police, Mohan said it was an accident. And in December drivers in Indianapolis stopped to rescue a three-year-old boy they’d seen wandering down the right lane of I-465 wearing only a T-shirt and a diaper. Police said that when they located the child’s mother–in a filthy apartment where a two-year-old was eating spaghetti off the floor–woke her up, and told her what had happened, her response was “Oh, he got out again.”
Can’t Possibly Be True
At a hearing in January an Iowa judge denied unemployment benefits to 25-year-old Emmalee Bauer, formerly a sales coordinator for the Sheraton hotel chain in Des Moines. She was fired last year after a supervisor discovered a 300-page single-spaced journal Bauer had allegedly written on company time in which she describes in detail her efforts to avoid doing any work. Excerpts: “This typing thing seems to be doing the trick. It just looks like I am hard at work on something very important. . . . I am going to sit right here and play Elf Bowling or some other nonsense. Once lunch is over, I will come right back to writing to piddle away the rest of the afternoon. . . . I just have to get through the next seven hours and forty-six minutes and then I will be free. . . . I have almost 100 pages here! I wonder how long that’s going to take to print?”
In January in Athens, Georgia, college student Cory Shapiro hailed a police car, complained that a nearby bar had made him pay for drinks he hadn’t ordered, and insisted the officer do something. After being asked for ID, the 19-year-old Shapiro was arrested for underage drinking; drug possession charges were added later, after jail personnel searched him. In the same month, Edgar Selavka, a 49-year-old Sunday school teacher in Northampton, Massachusetts, reported to police that his backpack had been stolen from church. While searching a men’s room stall only minutes later, officers found the backpack’s contents, which included Selavka’s checkbook and, allegedly, numerous images of child pornography.
