In the news
■ Kyle Frederick, Michael Irvine and Kyle Dean, who work and live together at Fire Station No. 465 at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, ran into each other at the hospital and soon celebrated as their sons were all born within 24 hours.
■ Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action lamented the record amount of trash picked up from New Jersey’s beaches, with plastic dominating the haul but “the weird stuff just keeps getting weirder,” including male enhancement pills, a set of braces, a glow-in-thedark condom and a Turkish Airlines hygiene kit.
■ Mari Oliver of Spring, Texas, won $90,000 from the state’s school boards association after several years of litigation over her sociology teacher insisting students write out the Pledge of Allegiance or get a zero.
■ Khalil Prater, 26, of Charlotte, N.C., was jailed on bank robbery charges after the FBI says he just kept repeating the crime, undeterred when tripped up by an electronic tracker slipped into the loot and even ignoring the GPS device he wore while out on pretrial release.
■ Randy Smith, sheriff of St. Tammany Parish, La., said “it is absolutely appalling” after a woman and her son were arrested on charges of stealing $91,400 from her 88-year-old aunt, plus taking her vehicle and giving it to a friend.
■ Lauren Heinen, 32, said, “We’re excited, the parish is excited and I’m looking forward to the next chapter” as she awaits swearing-in as the first female district attorney of Jeff Davis Parish, La., having bested the interim DA and a public defender at the polls.
■ Frank Anthony Pezzuto, 73, of Venice, Fla., was sentenced to 15 months in prison for making three threatening phone calls to congressional offices in Washington, with one voicemail saying he was coming to cut off the official’s head.
■ Kirkman Finlay, a state representative, called it “a dumpster fire” as lawmakers refuse to approve reelection bids for five University of South Carolina trustees over $10 million lent to the athletic department to buy out a football coach’s contract and a secret plane trip to meet with an unsuccessful school president candidate.
■ Ahmed Binyamin Alasiri, 45, of Garden Grove, Calif., got a 15-year, eightmonth prison sentence for selling methamphetamine to an undercover FBI employee three times while on supervised release after a terrorism conviction for which he did time with the Unabomber and Boston Marathon bomber.