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