Stupid people of the week

Inmate mistakenly released from jail after ‘fooling’ officers, sheriff reports

This is more of a smart criminal, stupid cop situation.

Arizona authorities are investigating how an inmate could have mistakenly been released from their custody on Thursday.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office reports Anthony Pena was booked into jail for failing to appear in court and drug charges. His bond was set at $250, and he was put in the minimum security general population area.

Arizona Family reports a few hours later, Pena then pretended to be a different inmate and was released from the detention center.

The sheriff’s office said its team is working on figuring out how the mistake happened along with getting a warrant for Pena’s arrest.

Deputies urged anyone with more information on the whereabouts of Pena to contact the Phoenix Police Department at 602-262-6151.

I think I’ve found video of the incident.

Source; KOLD

CNN accidentally sent welcome baskets to employees who had been laid off after the CNN+ streaming service flopped

CNN accidentally sent welcome baskets to employees who were laid off after the CNN+
streaming
service shuttered.

The paid streaming subscription service launched on March 29 and announced it was shutting down on April 21, Insider previously reported.

A week later, hundreds of laid-off staffers received welcome gifts, some of which had encouraging notes attached, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“This is an incredible time to be part of CNN,” one note said, per WSJ. “Build relationships and take time to connect with colleagues and learn so that you make the most of your time here.”

CNN told WSJ the baskets – which included branded gear, pens, headphones, and a popcorn maker – were sent by mistake.

CNN spent as much as $250 million on the launch and saw meager audience engagement out of the gate, never surpassing 10,000 viewers at any given time, per CNBC.

Company insiders blamed former CNN president Jeff Zucker and departed WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar for the failure.

“This was all ego. All a power play for a bigger job or independence. Hubris. Nothing more,” one former WarnerMedia exec said of Zucker, Insider previously reported. “The only people who ever thought this was a good idea either worked at CNN or were trying to get CNN + to hire them. Nobody else.”

Many CNN+ employees started in the last six months or even mere weeks before the March launch, per WSJ. Employees who do not find internal CNN roles will receive six months’ severance if they don’t leave the company within 90 days.

A former designer for CNN+, who spoke to Insider on the condition of anonymity, said they had only worked for CNN+ for a few months when they found out the service was shutting down.

“I remember texting my roommates and telling them I was getting fired,” the employee told Insider. “Everyone was utterly shocked.”

Source; Business Insider

MTA unveils ‘stunning’ $30M staircase at Times Square subway station

“Stunning” in the same way that a man in a dress is “Stunning and brave.”

Transit officials on Monday unveiled a new staircase and entryway at the Times Square subway station that they said cost the transit authority a cool $30 million to build.

MTA CEO Janno Lieber said the “stunning… first class” 15-foot wide staircase at the “center” of Broadway Plaza at 43rd Street Street would provide tourists and others with a clear path in and out of the “Crossroads of the World.”

The new staircase is 450 square feet bigger than its predecessor, which was also not as centrally located, Lieber said.

“It was so inconvenient. You saw so many tourists coming down there and being disoriented. Not anymore,” he said of the previous, narrower stairway. “The new entrance provides direct access to Times Square.”

The project also included a new $10 million elevator from the street to the mezzanine, which was paid for by Jamestown LP, which owns 1 Times Square. Elevator users can access the platforms via a different elevator from the mezzanine that opened last year, officials said.

Taxpayers and riders are on the hook for the $30 million cost of the staircase, street-level canopy, expanded turnstile area, 18 new close-caption surveillance cameras and a mosaic by the artist Nick Cave, officials said.

The 4,600-square foot artwork is the largest mosaic in the subway system, officials said.

New York’s transit projects are among the most expensive in the world, according to international experts.

But MTA President of Construction and Development Jamie Torres-Springer on Monday touted the new Times Square entrance at “$8 million under-budget and on time.”

“The project is a great example of how MTA has been making the most of lower ridership during COVID to transform the system and expedite the projects that make a real difference in daily commutes,” Torres-Springer said.

“All of this work gets done while running the busiest station complex in the system, under the busiest public gathering space in the world.”

Source; NY Post

How to Murder Your Husband writer found guilty of murdering husband

Hmmmm, I wonder what made the cops suspect her?

A jury in the US city of Portland, Oregon, has convicted a self-published romance novelist who wrote an essay titled How to Murder Your Husband of fatally shooting her husband.

The 12-person jury found Nancy Crampton Brophy, 71, guilty of second-degree murder on Wednesday after deliberating for two days over Daniel Brophy’s death, according to reports.

Brophy, a 63-year-old chef, was killed on 2 June 2018 as he prepared for work at the Oregon Culinary Institute in south-west Portland.

Crampton Brophy showed no visible reaction to the verdict in the crowded Multnomah county courtroom. Lisa Maxfield, one of her lawyers, said the defence team would appeal against the decision.

The defendant’s 2011 how-to treatise detailed various options for committing an untraceable killing, written in the form of a brainstorming exercise for writers.

Its opening reads: “As a romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about murder and, consequently, about police procedure. After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail. And let me say clearly for the record, I don’t like jumpsuits and orange isn’t my color.”

The blogpost went on to detail motives – financial, “lying, cheating bastard”, abuser – and a discussion of possible methods. Knives were “personal and close up. Blood everywhere”, while poison, “considered a woman’s weapon”, was too easy to trace, Crampton Brophy wrote. Guns were “loud, messy, require some skill”.

The circuit judge Christopher Ramras had excluded the essay from the trial, noting it had been published several years ago. Jurors were not allowed to consider it in their judgment. A prosecutor, however, alluded to the essay’s themes without naming it after Crampton Brophy took the stand.

Prosecutors told jurors Crampton Brophy was motivated by money problems and a life insurance policy.

However, Crampton Brophy said she had no reason to kill her husband and their financial problems had largely been solved by cashing in a portion of Brophy’s retirement savings plan.

She owned the same make and model of gun used to kill her husband and was seen on surveillance footage driving to and from the culinary institute, court exhibits and testimony showed.

Prosecutors alleged Crampton Brophy had bought a “ghost gun”, an untraceable firearm kit, and swapped parts with a shop-bought handgun.

Police have never found the gun that killed Brophy.

Defence lawyers said the gun parts were the inspiration for an idea Crampton Brophy’s had for a new book and suggested someone else might have killed Brophy during a botched robbery.

Crampton Brophy testified that her presence near the culinary school on the day of her husband’s death was mere coincidence and that she had parked in the area to work on her writing.

Crampton Brophy has been in custody since her arrest in September 2018. She will be sentenced on 13 June.

“I find it is easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them,” Crampton Brophy wrote in her 2011 post. “I don’t want to worry about blood and brains splattered on my walls. And really, I’m not good at remembering lies. But the thing I know about murder is that every one of us have it in him/her when pushed far enough.”

Source; The Guardian

Why the long face? Artist pilloried after creating half-horse, half-man sculpture

In Irish mythology, a púca is a mischievous, shapeshifting spirit that can take the form of a horse and entice unwary travellers on to its back for a wild ride.

Aidan Harte knows how that feels. Eighteen months ago the sculptor was commissioned to create a 2-metre tall bronze statue of a púca for the town square in Ennistymon, County Clare.

What followed was a headlong gallop into a surreal controversy about the role of public art in Ireland that only now, perhaps, is coming to an end.

Along the way Harte found himself trolled on social media, pilloried from the pulpit, championed by celebrities and credited as the unwitting inspiration for a music video featuring a mock execution.

“It’s the oddest thing,” said Harte, 43. “The púca is like the English puck that plays tricks. This story kept on getting stranger and stranger until I wondered if there was a bit of his magic.”

Clare county council decided in 2020 to spend €30,000 (£25,400) on a sculpture striking enough to attract tourists to Ennistymon, a town near the Atlantic coast. Harte won the tender and in early 2021 started work in his Dublin studio on what was to be The Púca of Ennistymon.

For the artist, who had studied in Florence, it was a dream job – bigger in scale and prominence than anything he had done before.

Harte sculpted a horse’s head and torso atop human legs. “A lot of public art in Ireland is abstract and corporate – nothing that anyone can get upset about. This was a full-blooded representation of one of the big forgotten characters of Irish folklore,” he said.

He sought to convey ambiguity, he said. “The fairies are not good or bad, they’re something in between. The púca is a creature of chaos. It’s that uneasy, unexpected feeling I wanted to give the sculpture.”

Harte got an uneasy, unexpected feeling of his own in April 2021 when photographs of the clay mould for the sculpture leaked to townsfolk in Ennistymon and elicited swift excoriation on social media. The sculpture was called ugly, frightening and hideous. The council was so taken aback it told Harte to pause the work.

More at the source, including the pictures you’ll just have to see.

Source; The Guardian

Car seized after racing police vehicle

[Australian Capital Territory] ACT Policing has seized the car driven by a 24-year-old Dunlop man after the driver admitted he was attempting to race a police vehicle.

About 8.30pm Sunday (22 May 2022) officers conducting patrols in Florey observed a black BMW 323i sedan accelerate away from them at speeds of up to 161km/h in the 80km/h zone on Ginninderra Drive.

When the driver stopped as directed by police, the driver said he thought the police were ‘his mates trying to race him’. The driver confirmed to the officers he was attempting to race their marked police vehicle and stated he had only recently regained his licence having previously lost it for speeding.

Due to the admissions made by the driver that he believed he was participating in a street race, his vehicle was seized.

The driver, who was a provisional licence holder, will face court on a date to be fixed.

Penalties for street racing include significant fines and loss of licence.

Officer in Charge, ACT Road Policing, Acting Inspector Steve Booth said he was dismayed by this incident after three fatalities had been recorded on ACT roads in the preceding three days.

“It is difficult to express my incredulity at driver behaviour like this example,” Acting Inspector Booth Said.

“Less than 48 hours before this incident, about a kilometre down the road, my officers and I spent several hours attending the scene of a crash where a man had died”.

“While the investigation into that incident, and two other deaths since Thursday night are still progressing, I would be very surprised if excessive speed was not a major contributing factor in all three cases”.

“I have a simple message to drivers, and it does not change. Slow down.”

Source; ACT Policing

Category: "Teh Stoopid", Crime, Police, Stupid Criminals, YGBSM!!