Would-be shoplifter gets caught with his pants down

Police: Robber forces man to withdraw cash at ATM

Police claim that man knocked daughter into cabinet, stomped on her back

Cherryville man arrested on child abuse charges

A TV judge, Jeanine Pirro, ruled that Calvin Owensby breached a verbal contract when he sold his five-legged puppy to a woman from Charlotte after he’d already agreed to sell it to John Strong, the freak show owner. Pirro awarded Strong $4,000, but the TV network paid it on Owensby’s behalf.

Now Strong says he’s going to take the dog’s new owner to court and try to get possession of it, even though it only has four legs now.

Here’s the newest story.

To recap the sequence of events:

Calvin Owensby, an out-of-work electrician from Gastonia, owns two dogs who had five puppies in early June. One of the puppies had a fifth leg growing from between its two hind legs.

I wrote a story about the dog and put together a video.

Owensby couldn’t afford to have the fifth leg amputated, so a handful of readers called the Gazette, and others called Owensby’s veterinarian, offering to help pay for the operation. A week after the original story was published I started writing a second story about readers banding together to pay the vet bill, and the same day a photographer put a note on my desk, saying the owner of a Coney Island Freak show needed Owensby’s phone number because he wanted to buy the dog.

I called Owensby and passed along Strong’s phone number. When I called Owensby later that afternoon, he said he had agreed to sell the dog for $3,000. I also talked to Strong, who was ecstatic about getting a five-legged dog to display in his show. Here’s the second story.

Owensby told me I should put his phone number in the article, in case any readers wanted to come see the dog before it went to New York. That night he received many outraged phone calls and one call from a woman who wanted to buy the dog. The next morning he sold it to her for $4,000 and called off the freak show deal. Here’s the third story.

Around this time the Associated Press picked up on the story, and the AP’s version appeared in newspapers all over the country.

About a week later Strong announced that he planned to take legal action to prevent the dog’s new owner from getting its leg amputated. The new owner, Allyson Siegel, had the leg removed immediately when she heard this news.

Warner Brothers heard about the saga and invited Strong to sue Owensby on the television show Judge Jeanine Pirro. Strong won the trial.

Now he says he plans to sue Siegel for possession of the dog.

Here are all the stories in chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 [the surprise amputation], 6 [court TV pt. I], 7 [court TV verdict].

Garvin said Love told him to keep his back turned, but Garvin refused.

“I knew he wouldn’t have no gun, knowing him being the person he is,” Garvin said. “He did take out a knife, and I wasn’t going to let him stab me in the back.”

So Garvin jumped out of his chair and told Love he could take the cash drawer, which contained $200, as long as he didn’t harm him, he said.

“So he did,” Garvin said. “He put the knife in his pocket, reached down and grabbed the drawer. And then he run. That’s when I called 911.”

[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]

Don Voigt, 89, walks between piles of tools, wire and cables, and sits down between his computer and his black ham radio. He dials in to his standard morning frequency, waits for a pause in the conversation, and clicks the button on his handset.

“W4HQF,” he says.

“Good mornin’, Pop!” several staticky voices say.

One voice comes from Cross, S.C. Another comes from Salisbury. Most come from Gaston County. Most belong to retired men who worked in electronics for years and turned to amateur radios for a hobby.

[Read the whole story here at the Gaston Gazette.]

When her husband asked for help in disposing a disemboweled body, Emily Jones only had one choice, Gaston County District Attorney Locke Bell said.

Her husband, Mark Jones, had shot the man in the attic of their Gastonia home and cut his body into pieces, Bell said. So Emily Jones helped her husband put the torso in a cedar chest and put the arms and head in a bucket. They placed everything in a trunk and dumped it in a field in South Carolina, Bell said. It was April 2005.

After a turkey hunter found the remains, which were once the body of Johnny Michael Boone of Gastonia, Mark and Emily Jones both went to jail.

[Read the whole story here at The Gaston Gazette.]

Mysterious customer cons business out of $15,000 worth of tomatoes

Gastonia man assaults family members with vacuum cleaner

Prosecutor: Wrong-way I-85 driver was suicidal

Gastonia man attacks police car

This morning Tosha Brooks lay on a stretcher, pretending she was unconscious, with an IV bag full of fake blood taped to her chest. It attached to a hose that led down to her thigh. With the pump in her hand she squirted blood from the hose, steadily, to the rhythm of her heartbeat.

The fake blood splashed all over a paramedic’s shirt.

When she reached the operating room, the machines said her heart stopped from excessive blood loss. Hospital staff pronounced her “dead,” so she was free to leave the hospital.

Brooks, 27, an emergency medical technician student at Gaston College, participated in a practice session for medical emergencies at Gaston Memorial Hospital.

[Read the whole story here and watch a video at The Gaston Gazette.]

Placid Solari, abbot of Belmont Abbey Monastery, glanced at his watch as he stepped into the parking lot of Gaston Memorial Hospital on Sunday afternoon. It was 3:45.

He was visiting his friend Raymond Geyer, an 86-year-old monk of Belmont Abbey. Solari gave Geyer communion and they spoke about death — they knew Geyer’s heart couldn’t last much longer — but he expected to visit again Monday, and to see Geyer back at the monastery this week.

When he got to the monastery, hours later, the other monks told him Geyer had died of heart failure around 3:50 p.m.

“I thought that his life expectancy might be in terms of weeks rather than months, but not in terms of minutes,” Solari said. “It was not on my mind that he was, at that moment I was leaving, dying.”

Geyer’s heart problems made him weak during his last few weeks, but friends say they will remember his energy and friendliness most.

[Read the whole story here at The Gaston Gazette.]