Florida Woman Used Baby to Beat Boyfriend, Police Say

A lot of weird things happen in Florida. We're here every Friday morning to give you the week's weirdest. Also, this week, we're here to remind all Floridians that despite any appearances to the contrary, babies are incredibly fragile creatures and should be treated as such.

Woman Allegedly Swung 6-Month-Old "Like a Bat" at Boyfriend

Eighteen is a difficult age. Sometimes your prom date dumps you at the last minute for a guy named Chet with a rat-tail haircut. Sometimes you do one too many Everclear shots on a dare and vomit into mom's prized ficus. Sometimes your car gets taken away because you flunked calculus.

And sometimes your boyfriend refuses to escort you to a public bathroom, which means your only recourse is to swing your 6-month-old child at him on a crowded beach on Independence Day.

Volusia County Beach Safety Ocean Rescue officials say Tatyana Allen, 18, did just that last July 4. According to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Allen, who lives in Orlando, had been vacationing in Daytona that weekend. The paper reported that Allen herself called 911 that day to claim her boyfriend had pushed and hit her after refusing to walk her to the bathroom.

But the many witnesses hanging at the beach on Fourth of July told police they watched as Allen, enraged, hit her boyfriend repeatedly before grabbing her 6-month-old and swinging him "like a bat" at the man.

"She just beat her like 3-month-old baby, if that, against her boyfriend and threw him in the sand facedown," a 911 caller said. "The baby was screaming. It was facedown in the sand; it can't hold its head up."

Allen has since been charged with battery and infliction of physical/mental injury on a child. She has denied the charges.

But witnesses said that when Allen tried to walk up to the Daytona Beach boardwalk after the incident, she accidentally smacked the baby's head against a metal railing. Happy Fourth!

Man With History of Illegal Telemarketing Hacked to Death by Machete

New Times has long warned against the dangers of unlicensed telemarketing. It's a slippery slope. One day, you're making backroom cold-calls on a stolen phone headset, hawking knockoff Shamwows to the elderly; the next day, you're breaking into your neighbors' houses, crouching in corners, and trying to rip things off walls.

The latest example comes from the Tampa Bay Times: Early Tuesday morning, a Clearwater man with a long rap sheet, including multiple counts of "unlicensed telemarketing," broke into his neighbor's home on an apparent drug binge, only to get hacked to death by a machete-wielding homeowner.

Robert James Alcade, 31, broke into the home of Steven and Heather Aiosa through a front window that morning. According to the Times, the couple found Alcade "crouching in the corner of the room" and "throwing things off shelves and trying to climb the walls."

He was "very characteristic of people who have taken drugs," Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri later told reporters.

This being Florida, Steven Aiosa immediately whipped out a .22-caliber rifle from under his bed to subdue the intruder. But the gun jammed. In any other state, a rational person's response would be to either call the cops, flee, or both, but instead, Aiosa brandished a machete and started slashing chunks out of Alcade's legs and body. Alcade eventually bled to death. It was an "extremely bloody situation," said Gulatieri, apparently also the sheriff of Obvious County.

The Times eventually reached Alcade's father, Robert: "My son was a mess," he said.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers Player Locked Inside a Museum Overnight, Ben Stiller-Style

Journeyman NFL wide receiver Louis Murphy, currently a member of the Tampa Bay Bucs, apparently got so drunk at a friend's wedding at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach that he passed out on some stairs. When he woke up, everyone was gone, and Murphy realized he was locked inside the museum.

"This was really just a series of small unfortunate circumstances," Murphy said in a statement.

Uh, yeah, like a statue of Henry Flagler coming to life overnight and vowing to drain Lake Okeechobee, only for Murphy to awaken the ghost of Julia Tuttle, team up with her, lock Flagler in a wooden trunk for eternity, and save the Everglades?

Nope. Apparently, Murphy just broke a glass door and let himself out before calling the cops.