Watercooler Stories

Police: Woman stole pills from care home

WIND GAP, Pa., May 4 (UPI) -- Police in Pennsylvania said a nursing home caretaker is accused of leaving patients alone while she sold stolen morphine pills door to door.

Wind Gap police said Mechelle Looney, 42, a caretaker at Lynn's Personal Care Home, stole morphine pills from the facility and left residents, some of whom suffer from dementia, alone while she attempted to sell the pills door to door, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Thursday.

Police said they received a call Tuesday from a resident who said a woman had come to her house and attempted to sell her morphine. Officers went to Lynn's Personal Care Home and Looney, who matched the description given by the resident, answered the door.

Looney admitted to stealing the pills and attempting to sell them while leaving the patients on their own.

Patricia Friend, owner of the care home, said she performed an inventory and discovered 10 morphine pills were missing.

Looney was arraigned Wednesday on charges of drug possession, possession with intent to deliver, theft by unlawful taking and reckless endangerment.

Jail visitor locked up for exposure

CLEARWATER, Fla., May 4 (UPI) -- Authorities in Florida said a jail visitor found himself behind bars after exposing himself to a monitor-image of his wife.

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, which installed closed-circuit TV screens for jail visitors to talk to inmates in the 1990s, said Mitchell Thomas, 46, of St. Petersburg, was visiting his wife, Monique, 30, at the jail Tuesday when he exposed his genitals to the cameras around 5:45 p.m., the Tampa Bay Times reported Thursday.

Thomas was jailed at the facility and ordered held in lieu of $150 bail.

Monique Thomas has been jailed since October on charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, disorderly intoxication, retail theft and domestic battery.

Atheist converts, changes mind

SAN ANTONIO, May 4 (UPI) -- A Texas man who has been suing officials for decades on allegations of endorsing Christianity said he briefly converted before returning to atheism.

Patrick Greene, 63, who has filed complaints and lawsuits against officials in California and Texas for more than 30 years on allegations of violating the constitution by endorsing Christianity, said he converted to Christianity briefly in April before reading the Bible and switching back to atheism, the San Antonio Express-News reported Thursday.

"I got all caught up in the excitement," Greene said. "It's easy to do when you get ostracized and treated like garbage. When you're an atheist, you're public enemy No. 1."

He said reading the first book of the Bible, Genesis, led him to once again abandon Christianity.

"The more I read the Bible, the more I realized, this is such a crock," he said.

However, Greene said he will always be grateful to the Sand Springs Baptist Church in Athens, which started a fund for him when he discovered he had a detached retina.

"We will be forever grateful to them," he said. "It brought us out of a hole."

Blacklist threatened over penny debt

SWANSEA, Wales, May 4 (UPI) -- A bank threatened a Welsh customer with being credit blacklisted and told her she would accrue daily fines over a debt of one penny.

The Halifax, part of the Lloyds Banking Group, told Lesley Ross, 60, of Swansea, Wales, she could expect $8 daily fines and would blacklisted if the debt was not paid within 28 days, The Sun reported Thursday.

"It's incredible to think they'll send out this kind of letter over such a tiny amount of money," Ross said.

Ross said she complained about the letter when she went into the bank last week to pay off the overdraft.

"I told them what I thought about the letter and they were very apologetic," she said. "They even offered to compensate me but I told them I wasn't interested in compensation. That wasn't the point of my complaint. I am more concerned about their attitude to their customers."