NEWS OF THE WEIRD
Parent of the year
Jose Manuel Navarrete, 25, was being held on $100,000 bond on suspicion of child endangerment in the San Diego Central jail after he carried his 2-year-old daughter into the elephant habitat at the San Diego Zoo on March 19, the Associated Press reported.
Navarrete allegedly wanted to take a picture with the African bull elephant, police said, and evaded multiple barriers. Witness video shows one of the elephants charging the trespassers and Navarrete briefly dropping the toddler before picking her up and getting her to safety.
“He runs, throws his baby through the gate and it’s seconds from hitting him,” said witness Jake Ortale. “People were just mad at this guy.”
Fries with that stapler?
Good Fortune Burger in Toronto has renamed some if its menu items as office supplies as a not-so-underhanded way to help customers get reimbursed for lunch, the National Post reported, and perhaps boost sales.
The restaurant’s Fortune Burger is now the Basic Steel Stapler, and Parm Fries will appear on a receipt as CPU Wireless Mouse.
Director of operations Jon Purdy said the restaurant “just wanted an opportunity to put a smile on some people’s faces and have them have a little bit of a giggle.”
Tunnel vision
A motorist in Delray Beach, Fla., stopped to investigate the screaming she heard March 23 and found a naked woman trapped in a storm drain 8 feet below street level.
The Washington Post reported first responders pulled the unnamed 43-year-old woman to safety and took her to a hospital as investigators discovered she had been reported missing by her boyfriend three weeks earlier, Palm Beach County sheriff ’s officials said.
The woman told officers she had been swimming in a canal when she noticed a door leading to a tunnel, which she entered, and then became lost, wandering for weeks in the tunnel system and surviving on a bottle of ginger ale she found.
Ted White, a spokesman for the Delray police, was skeptical: “Was she actually down there the whole time?” Health officials think she might have been in the tunnels just a few days, he said.
This hit an accident
Phedeline St. Felix told police in Pompano Beach, Fla., she had gone to a city park in mid-march to settle an argument with another woman when she allegedly drove her car over a gate and into a playground, accidentally hitting Chaunda Mccleod and her 3-year-old grandson instead, injuring them both.
“I was attempting to run (the other woman) over,” St. Felix said, according to WPLG-TV.
Mccleod said she saw a fight brewing in the park and “started to get all the kids together to get them out of the park . ... As I’m picking (my grandson) up, she’s just hitting us both and we just went flying over the car and finally we hit the ground.”
St. Felix was arrested and ordered not to have any contact with the victims.
Big iphone surprise
An unnamed teenager in Thailand was excited by the surprisingly low price he found online for an Apple iphone, and even though the shipping seemed a little high, he went ahead and ordered it, Oddity Central reported.
The surprise came when he received a box nearly as tall as he was and found inside a coffee table shaped like an iphone.
The teen posted photos of his acquisition on social media and admitted he had been so anxious to snag the bargain that he didn’t read the listing carefully.