Lead Story
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In January in Vancouver, Washington, 24-year-old Trilane A. Ludwig called his mother from jail and told her to fetch $500 from his wallet, which the police had given her for safekeeping, and come bail him out. The money was all in shoddy counterfeit bills (they were actually the wrong size), but both Ludwig and his mother claimed they hadn’t known it was fake–he said he’d got the cash from a man who’d bought a car from him, but when pressed he couldn’t come up with the buyer’s name.
Our Litigious Society
Another Geographic Center of Weird
In Long Beach, California, a cleaning crew forgot to turn out the lights or lock the doors at a Bank of the West branch, and a customer had the whole place to himself when he came by on the Martin Luther King holiday. (He notified the police.) In South Brunswick, New Jersey, officers ticketed a 19-year-old for careless driving after he ran into an ambulance at a red light; he was distracted because he’d been reading a speeding ticket he’d just received. And a bill was introduced in the Indiana legislature permitting inmates serving life without parole to choose execution instead.