• In the state legislature in Tallahassee, a bill was filed to require restaurants never to run out of toilet paper or soap.
• A 50-year-old man in Port Charlotte was charged with ripping a $6,000 cardiac monitor off a wall of a hospital emergency room, along with a $600 otoscope and a $100 blood-pressure cuff. The outburst occurred after he asked for something to eat and was told he couldn’t have food until he had been seen by a doctor.
• A woman from Haiti was arrested in Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport when authorities found a human skull in her luggage. As a practitioner of voodoo, “she truly does believe that a skull will protect her,” her lawyer advised the court. The judge accepted the explanation and gave the defendant 2 years’ probation, even though it’s against the law to bring body parts into the country without certification for scientific use.
• At a murder trial in Miami, a nurse called as a prospective juror was excused after she told the court she could not sit on the case if the jury were to be sequestered for several weeks, because no one was available to sit for her pet ferret.
• A student at the University of Central Florida was arrested and charged with starting a fire in his dormitory, just so, he said, he could meet women during the evacuation.
• The Lee County sheriff reported that a man robbed a hotel desk clerk shortly after midnight while talking all through the holdup on a cell phone.
• A 29-year-old was arrested in Clearwater and charged with stealing motorcycle parts after police recovered photos of the parts, which they believed were taken by the suspect. At the bottom of each photo, the photographer’s bare toes displayed the tattooed words “white” and “trash,” matching tattoos on his own toes.
• Also in Clearwater, lawyers for a divorced husband asked the court to let him stop paying $1,250 a month alimony to his ex-wife because she had since become a man after a sex change. They argued that because it’s illegal for a man to marry a man in Florida, it should be illegal for a man to pay alimony to a man. Counsel for the former wife countered that the husband agreed to pay the alimony until his ex-spouse dies or remarries and she has done neither.
• In Fort Myers, a 240-pound man charged with punching a mother at a mall while he was wearing an Easter bunny suit at a holiday photo shoot pleaded no contest and got probation. The defendant and his wife had argued with the organizer of the event, and police alleged he finally took off his bunny head and clouted her while frightened youngsters looked on.
• Citing a personal code of honor, a retired Air Force pilot refused to pay for his $15.99 shrimp and scallop verdura dinner in Palm Harbor because it contained only five small shrimp and five scallops. He told a reporter he wouldn’t be able to look at himself in a mirror if he paid or even negotiated a settlement, so he hired a $500-an-hour New York lawyer and got an acquittal.
