Special Edition: All Recurring Themes
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Stories where ordinary citizens pretending to be police officers pull over and scold their fellow drivers are a News of the Weird staple, but a March incident in Boca Raton, Florida, took it to another level. A community service officer said he pulled up near a group of three stopped cars to find what he thought were two young men standing alongside: one was in handcuffs; the other, in military fatigues, claimed to be an off-duty sheriff’s deputy making an arrest and asked him to radio for backup. When a second officer arrived, however, he immediately recognized the would-be deputy as 21-year-old Rachel Otto, who reportedly had been arrested herself nine times since 2004. In this case Otto, who is five foot two with close-cropped hair, had apparently gotten mad at another driver for cutting her off and convinced a third driver to help her force him off the road. A female passenger in Otto’s car told investigators she’d moved in with Otto the week before but hadn’t realized her new roommate was a woman.
As at least four other people have done this decade, in April an 18-year-old Tokyo woman committed suicide by jumping off a building and landed on a pedestrian below. Unlike his unfortunate counterparts in Nishinomiya, Japan, in 2004 and Taichung, Taiwan, in 2000, the 60-year-old man she landed on survived.
To the list of people who might have seemed particularly unlikely to fall for Nigerian e-mail scams but did anyway, add 56-year-old Tom Katona, former treasurer of Alcona County, Michigan, who pleaded guilty in May to embezzlement and forgery charges after apparently wiring $1.2 million in county money (plus his own life’s savings) to various shady overseas bank accounts.
