It’s generally accepted that to be any sort of effective criminal, you have to be physically intimidating. Maybe you have lots of muscles. Maybe you have a gun. Maybe you just have a really nasty looking scar on your face. Either way, the idea is that you get taken seriously as a possible threat to somebody’s safety so they’ll give you money.
Instead, Americans are demonstrating constantly that most crooks couldn’t take Chelsea Handler’s midget sidekick in a fight, especially recently, as two would-be thieves found themselves dropped by unlikely owners of extremely large cans of whoop-ass. Crooks foiled by cancer patients and guys with one leg, today on Uproxx News.
First, we have the story of Helen Dunsford, a resident of Oakland Park, Florida. Helen, unfortunately, is suffering from Stage 4 cancer, and we wish her a complete recovery, because frankly we’re pretty sure that if we don’t she’ll do us in Undertaker-style.
Helen was at her local Bank of America to make a withdrawal when Renee Breen walked in. Breen pulled a pistol from her purse and demanded $10,000 from the bank, which was the last thing she said before Dunsford put her in a bear hug and dragged her to the ground, pinning her until the police arrived.
Dunsford said to reporters that Breen had gotten on her last nerve. Breen and two other suspects were apprehended at the scene. Demonstrating the kind of competence you expect from a plot foiled by a senior citizen with a serious disease taking down your main thief, one suspect claimed that Breen had mental problems and Breen herself claimed it was an April Fools’ joke. Because threatening people with guns for money is absolutely hi-larious in Florida. Breen is being held on charges of attempted armed robbery.
Meanwhile, in Middleton, Massachusetts, Stephen Cornell was out for a walk when he happened to look through the window of his friendly neighborhood store and saw the owner of JC’s Grill and Pizza with a gun stuck in his face, emptying the cash register. Cornell, who lost a leg at the age of 12, thought quickly and, as the thief was leaving, stuck out his prosthetic leg, tripping the thief.
The thief promptly established his wuss bonafides by getting beaten up by Cornell and the store owner, Edson Andrade, being put in a chokehold, and dragged back inside. Inside, they discovered the pistol was actually a pellet gun. Cornell showed amazing restraint and did not, in fact, beat the thief with his prosthetic leg, like we would have.
The thief, who turned out to be local man Eric Homen, pled not guilty to armed robbery, probably because he misunderstood what “armed” meant in that context. Meanwhile, Cornell and Dunsford are currently debating suing Fox over their hastily announced new cop show, “Chemo and Stumpy”.
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- Don’t mess with a little old lady with stage 4 cancer. She will be in a very, very bad mood. (Daily Mail)
- Similarly, the guy with the fake leg has a handy club to beat you with. Just saying. (MSNBC)
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- In iPad news, the iPad 2 is so popular in China, they can’t even keep paper replicas of it on the shelves. The paper replicas are burned as part of the Qingming or “tomb-sweeping” festival, where the dead are honored with replicas of money and luxury items put to the torch. But at least the dead get a bitchin’ hard drive: iPad 2 replicas have 888GB hard drives. (Reuters)
- Meanwhile, Apple is kicking Google in the teeth when it comes to app sales, web traffic, and just about every other metric that isn’t OS market share. Basically, Google may be able to sell smartphones, but it apparently can’t get them on the web or buying silly games for a buck. (Appolicious)
- Meanwhile, after years of covering Apple’s domineering ways, the Financial Times is discovering just how obnoxious they can be the hard way, by clashing with Apple over, what else, subscribers. The Times wants subscribers to sign up directly; Apple wants them to sign up via the App Store. Maybe you should poll the subscribers to see if they care, guys. (Yahoo!)
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- 8.2% of Americans have ever been diagnosed with cancer. Coincidentally, that’s also the percentage of Americans who can body slam another grown adult into the concrete. (CDC)
- Meanwhile, 1 in 200 Americans have lost a limb to vascular disease, cancer, congenital defect, and trauma. That’s .5%, so Eric Homen there really beat the odds in getting his ass handed to him by a dude with one leg. (Amputee Coalition)
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