LAKE HALLIE, Wis. – A police officer fatally shot a developmentally disabled woman inside a western Wisconsin Wal-Mart after she refused to drop a hatchet she had grabbed from a shelf, authorities say.
Chippewa County Sheriff Jim Kowalczyk said the woman was shopping with chaperones Friday at the store in Lake Hallie. Lake Hallie police were called around 5 p.m. after she grabbed a hatchet from a sporting goods department shelf and began using it on pillows and other items before officers showed up.
He said police arrived and ordered her to drop the hatchet. “She did not cooperate, and then apparently lunged at the officer, and he did what he is trained to do, and shot her,” Kowalczyk said Friday.
The woman was taken to an Eau Claire hospital with wounds to her abdomen and thigh. The 25-year-old woman died Friday night and an autopsy is planned for Sunday.
A Kansas man is suspected of child abuse after police said his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son, who was in his care, was found not breathing because an octopus was lodged in his throat.
Police said the child’s mother from Wichita, Kan., returned home from work Tuesday night and discovered her boyfriend performing CPR on her son. The child was rushed to a local hospital where “an obstruction was removed from his throat,” according to the report.
Wichita police Lt. James Espinoza said doctors first noticed facial injuries and then found a dead octopus – the head measuring about 2 inches in diameter – in the boy’s throat. Surprisingly, the toddler was released from the hospital Friday after his condition was upgraded to “great.”
His mother’s boyfriend, identified as 36-year-old Matthew Gallagher, was arrested on suspicion of child abuse after police said his account for the boy’s bruises and bizarre octopus injury did not match the evidence.
COON RAPIDS, Minn. – A prank caller tricked workers at a Minnesota Burger King into smashing the windows of the restaurant to keep it from exploding, police said Saturday.
Employees at the restaurant in the Minneapolis suburb of Coon Rapids got the call Friday night from someone claiming to be with the fire department. The caller said the restaurant could explode, so they needed to relieve the pressure.
“Officers arrived and found that the manager and employees of the Burger King were smashing out the windows,” Sgt. Rick Boone told the Star Tribune. “The manager explained they’d received a phone call from a male who identified himself as a fireman who said there were dangerous levels of gas in the building and they had to break out all the windows to keep the building from blowing up.”
The restaurant was boarded up Saturday, and investigators were trying to identify the caller. Someone placed a similar call to a Burger King in Shawnee, Oklahoma, on Thursday, claiming there were high levels of carbon monoxide in the building. The window damage there was estimated at $10,000.
CHICAGO – Comedian Andy Richter says he remembers the chair facing the showers that Dennis Hastert placed in the boys’ locker room at the high school where Hastert coached wrestling before becoming an Illinois congressman.
Richter attended Yorkville High School in the 1980s. He tweeted about the chair Friday night after prosecutors mentioned it in a court filing in the former House Speaker’s hush-money case. “I went to Yorkville HS ’80-’84 & I remember this chair. Purportedly ‘to keep boys from fighting,”’ Richter tweeted, referring to the chair, which prosecutors describe as similar to a “Lazyboy” in the court filing.
Richter, the sidekick on Conan O’Brien’s TV show, says he was “struck by how easy it was” for Hastert to do that. He added: “Nobody questioned it.”
Prosecutors say Hastert agreed to pay $3.5 million to a man he sexually abused when the man was a 14-year-old wrestler on Hastert’s team. The court filing details sexual abuse allegations involving five former students at the suburban Chicago school during Hastert’s tenure there from 1965 to 1981.
Associated Press & Washington Post
