I remember a few years ago there was an attempted robbery at a Jack in the Box. Apparently the cashier told the would be robber, “you ain’t robbin’ shit.” Made it all the way to the front of r/atetheonion for a day or two.

My favorite from my time working in the news industry:

Neighbor puts toilets in their yard facing other neighbors house. That neighbor builds a fence so they don’t have to look at the toilets. Original neighbor then hangs toilets from the tree so it is visible over the fence. Cue complaints to get toilets removed by city/county.

I believe the original dispute had to do with tearing out a shared bush and parking on lawn, but I don’t recall the details.

Well I live in Philadelphia, and just in the decade I’ve been here, I’ve seen some shit.

The unsolved Hitchbot murder, and then a local radio station’s attempt to repair our good name before the Pope arrived.

The dumpster pools in Kensington.

“Do attend.”

When the Eagles won the Super Bowl and chaos ensued. I can’t find any source on this in particular, but my gf and I agree we heard on the police scanners that a giraffe had been freed from the zoo and was running down Girard.

Drumline Elmo, who has become as big a celebrity in the city as Gritty.

Gritty, who is a national hero in our eyes.

All of which doesn’t even factor in the everyday life crazy. This place is wild, and I’m all for it.

In the city where i live right now, in 1975, two teenagers, a 16 years old male, and a 13 years old female, went for a motorbike ride in a field next to a wood. They never came back. Their bodies were found, shot point blank by 22 caliber in the head and in the chest. Their bodies were placed one over the other voluntarily. There were some claims that they were also found naked, but police data isn’t clear about that. They never found what really happened.

The whole Lorena Bobbit thing happened in my home town.

A monster from the woods kept massacring farmers’ livestock so the Governor led an expedition to kill it. He was so thoroughly terrified by the experience that he ran out of the forest. The monster was never found.

About 10 years ago someone actually burned to death from static discharge at a gas pump like 2 miles down the road from my house. It’s extremely rare, but it does happen.

A guy brazenly snuck into an army barracks, stole an Armored Personnel Carrier and then went on a bit of a rampage through the city. Crashing into a police station, law courts and Police HQ.

The media called it a tank rampage, because they didn’t know the difference between an APC and a tank.

The story is all but forgotten now, I never hear anyone talk about this incident. And the killdozer story in Colorado pretty much trumps it anyway.

Long ago when I lived in Florida there was a lady who shot her husband for eating the last fried pork chop. I tried to find it online but there are a variety of similar stories and it was before everything was online.

Construction workers were digging foundations at a local work site and found a Soviet T-34 tank burried in the ground.

Important context:

• My town is not in Russia or the former USSR.
• My town is not in Europe either.
• Our military doesn’t even operate Soviet equipment.
• My town is also not next to a border with a country who might have operated Soviet equipment when it was also not so friendly with my country.

There are some plausible theories, but to this day nobody really knows how it got here or why it got burried.

Ohh and the real kicker: the street this all happened on is named after an indigenous tank, so the news headlines all basically said “Tank found on Tank street!”

I have two.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brink’s_robbery Summary: an armored car was robbed by desperate “most-wanted” types. Bug national new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilchrest_Road,_New_York,_crossing_accident Summary: school bus full of kids hit by a train. The reason why “this vehicle stops at all rr crossings” is a thing.

There was a serial killer in Stockton, CA a couple years back that got hunted down to a place in the rural bits near Ione

That house is across the street and 1 over from me, and they get swat to visit them about once a year for some shit or another

Well it’s more of a family story. My grandfather was around 13 during the war (ww2). We’re from a wetland area and he told me he and his friend used to hide from nazis by jumping next to the plank (lined up planks were used as roads), into the water, and breathing through a reed.

Fun fact: Everybody including kids had boats, and sleighs for the winter. Everything happened over water.

Eventually he ended up having to work for them without pay. He had to bike hours every day to get to this landing strip he had to work on for them.

No airplane ever took off there. The allies bombed the living daylights out of it! He also told me he saw dog fighting in the sky and how exciting that was.

Today it’s a nature reserve! The countless bomb craters have water in them, and are teeming with life. So I like to think he helped improve the local biodiversity 😁

Corrupt sheriff was brought down by a University student.. Whitley county is the only one that doesn’t send drugs for disposal to a central statewide disposal facility. Nobody can prove corruptions until two students start digging. Cops get mad and start threatening them. Money laundering, theft, extortion, threats are all uncovered. Lexigton police finally bust the guy for 18 year sentence. Not a single blip in the national news. I often wonder if there’s more justice stories out there that we never hear because it isn’t useful as a component of a larger narrative.

Threre was a nazi commandat that rigged bath with hot water from cremation ovens in Majdanek (as told by a tour guide)