Lead Stories
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A 36-year-old man from Arcadia, Florida, checked himself into a mental hospital in March after being identified as “the Choking Man,” who’d been pretending to choke on food in public in order to induce women to wrap their arms around him and give him the Heimlich maneuver; afterward he’d hug and kiss them lavishly and attempt to initiate a relationship, often showing them pictures of his wife and daughter to earn their trust before asking for a phone number. According to a sheriff’s spokesman in Charlotte County, locale of many of the performances, the Choking Man probably hasn’t done anything illegal.
In March in Mombasa, Kenya, three men died in a 40-foot pit latrine after a student dropped her cell phone into it. (She’d offered a reward of about $13–almost two weeks’ wages for an average Kenyan.) The first man climbed down a ladder into the pit, and when he stopped answering bystanders’ shouts, a second man started after him and fell to the bottom. As police watched, a third man collapsed halfway down, overcome by fumes, and was dragged back out. (Officers had to restrain a fourth man from going in after the first two.) The phone was not found.
In October, Robert Paul Rice, an inmate of Utah State Prison, lost his appeal in a lawsuit demanding that the prison accommodate him as a vampire by providing special meals and allowing him conjugal visits so he could partake in “the vampiric sacrament” (drinking blood). A prison spokesman said that no one gets conjugal visits in Utah, blood drinking or otherwise.
Undignified Deaths
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Shawn Belschwender.
