Thomas Hickman drove through New Mexico, police say, until his Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo ran out of gas. Then the 55-year-old North Richland Hills man walked into a field, tied helium balloons to a gun, covered his mouth with duct tape, and shot himself in the back of the head, according to New Mexico State Police.

That determination is a far leap from what authorities first suspected when Mr. Hickman’s body was discovered March 15 near Santa Rosa, N.M., about 100 miles east of Albuquerque. Authorities initially thought the Red Lobster executive had been kidnapped and slain.
Continue reading…

A New York man who says he was denied a seat on a five-hour JetBlue flight and was instead told to “hang out” in the plane’s bathroom has sued the airline for $2 million, saying he suffered “extreme humiliation.”

When Gokhan Mutlu arrived to check in for a JetBlue flight from San Diego to New York in February he was told the flight was full, according to the lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court.

But Mutlu was allowed to board after a JetBlue flight attendant agreed to give up her seat and travel in an airline employee “jump seat.” It was not clear in the lawsuit whether the flight attendant was working.

However 90 minutes into the flight, the pilot told Mutlu the flight attendant was uncomfortable and he would have to give up his seat and “hang out” in the bathroom for the remainder of the flight, the lawsuit said.

The pilot “became angry at (Mutlu’s) reluctance” and said Mutlu “should be grateful for being onboard,” the lawsuit said. When Mutlu volunteered to sit in the “jump seat,” he was told it was reserved for airline personnel.

At one point, the airplane experienced turbulence and Mutlu sat on the toilet seat without a seat belt, causing him “tremendous fear,” the lawsuit said.

JetBlue was not immediately available for comment.

A drunken 78-year-old Swede stole a dinghy after a night out in the Danish town of Helsingor and tried to row back to Sweden, but fell asleep halfway, Danish police said.

When the man discovered he lacked the necessary funds to pay for the ferry from Helsingor to Helsingborg in Sweden on Saturday, he decided to row the three miles across the strait of Oresund that separates the two.

He quickly grew tired and, trusting fortune and the currents to see him safely home, took a snooze at the bottom of the boat, where Danish police later found him out at sea, still asleep.

The strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Police said the owner of the dinghy had decided not to press charges.

Police in Australia have charged a man for drink driving in a motorized wheelchair after he was found to be six times over the legal alcohol limit, local media reported on Monday.

Police in the tropical northern Queensland city of Cairns said the man had a blood alcohol reading of 0.31, and was so drunk he was asleep at the controls of his motorized wheelchair in a turning lane of a major highway.

“It beggars belief,” Police Inspector Bob Walters told the Cairns Post newspaper, adding wheelchairs, bicycles, horses and skateboards were all considered to be vehicles under the state’s road laws.

“It’s unlawful, it is unacceptable and people should realize it could lead to a fatality,” he said.

Other motorists on the four-lane highway had to swerve to avoid the wheelchair, police said.

A 1.8 meter (nearly six feet) python has been found in a toilet bowl in a highrise apartment in Australia’s northern tropical city of Darwin, media reported on Friday.

The Northern Territory News said the black-headed python was found in a 10th floor toilet.

Reptile catcher Chris Peberdy told the newspaper the python, likely to be a runaway pet, had been traveling through the building’s sewer pipes.

“When I saw it I was pretty shocked,” he said. “There is no possible other way it could have got there than through the toilet. I had to give him a wash because he was wet and a bit smelly.”

A woman who attempted to escape from jail in Sydney had to be rescued by police after she became stuck in an air conditioning duct, police said on Thursday.

The 22-year-old woman had just been refused bail by a Sydney court when she attempted the escape, but then spent about an hour stuck in the air vent before she was rescued.

Police in the New South Wales state said the woman would now face an extra charge of attempting to escape

Alison DeLauzon thought the snapshots and home videos of her infant son were gone for good when she lost her digital camera while on vacation in Florida.

Then a funny thing happened: her camera “phoned home.”

Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon’s camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but had even uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.

“I opened up the Eye-Fi manager on the computer and, lo and behold, there are the guys that stole our cameras,” said DeLauzon, a native of New York’s Long Island suburb. “Not only is it the guy who stole our camera … but the guy took a picture of (his accomplice) holding our other camera.”

DeLauzon received the Eye-Fi, a 2-gigabyte SD memory card that fits into millions of digital cameras, as a holiday gift to go with her Canon camera.

Priced at about $100, the card automatically uploads pictures to a home computer or online photosharing service as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network.

Luckily, the culprits passed by an unsecured network, whose factory-installed setting matched that of DeLauzon’s home system, and the Eye-Fi automatically shipped the photos: first baby pictures, then the snap-happy scoundrels.

Her experience reflects the rise of technology that empowers everyday gadgets to protect themselves or the priceless personal data — from family phone numbers to business budgets — that consumers keep on portable electronics devices.

Cameras are perhaps the most common home-phoning gadget used to thwart criminals.

An eerie case occurred last month, when a Japanese man set up a hidden camera because food was disappearing from his kitchen. While he was out, the camera sent pictures to his mobile phone of the intruder — an unknown woman living secretly in his closet.