• A man who robbed a Walgreens pharmacy in South Carolina this summer apparently wasn’t fully prepared for job.
Greenwood Today reported that Robert Sexton, 33, walked into the drug store and went to the pharmacy counter, where he asked a clerk if he could borrow an ink pen. She handed one over – and he used it to write a robbery note to her.
The clerk gave him the painkillers and other pills he was demanding, and he left the pharmacy.
But then, according to the newspaper, he came back and made her give him the pen, as well.
Must have been a nice one.
• A District of Columbia appeals court recently upheld the convictions of two convenience store operators on charges of selling drug paraphernalia from their store.
The items? Non-working ink pens and pieces of metal pot scrubbers that, when combined, could be used to smoke crack cocaine, according to the court’s decision, published on Leagle.com.
Apparently, police raided the store and found a box of “glass ball pens” that were all nearly out of ink. When a customer would come in and ask for an ink pen, a clerk would sell one of those useless pens along with a piece of the pot scrubber for US$4.
The buyer would take out the pen’s innards and put the piece of the scouring pad inside to act as a filter for the crack.
During the trial, the store owner and his employee both testified that they would not purposely order almost-empty pens and never noticed anything unusual about the pens. They couldn’t explain why they had the pens – or why they sold them individually in plastic bags with a piece of pot scrubber.
They were convicted and appealed, claiming that the government didn’t prove they intended the kits to be used to smoke crack.
The appeals court judges didn’t buy it.
• When a man being held in a Las Vegas jail had a problem with his cellmate last month, he seems to have settled it with a pencil – fatally.
The Associated Press reported that Carl Guilford had been arrested for killing his 6-year-old cousin. He was put into the Clark County Detention Facility, where he shared a cell with another inmate.
Guards doing a bed check found the cellmate lying on the floor covered by a bloody sheet. Guilford said he stabbed the man to death with a pencil because the devil told him only one of them could live, according to the AP.
You have to wonder…why did they let the suspected killer have a pencil in the first place?
• New Orleans police have locked up a Navy man accused of the ink-pen murder of his wife earlier this year.
The body of Mary Marx was found in her home in May, with two severe puncture wounds. Police said it appeared that she had been stabbed in the face and chest with an ink pen, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Police fingered David Marx, 43, after talking to witnesses who saw a man leaving the house. He was arrested by Navy investigators in Norfolk, Va. and was recently extradited to New Orleans.
No idea what kind of pen it was.
On the positive side, according to many television dramas, a plastic ballpoint pen with the innards removed can be used to perform an emergency tracheotomy if someone is choking!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InstantDramaJustAddTracheotomy
@Trixie, you’re right…the government even has an official ballpoint pen that soldiers are trained to use that way in emergencies.
https://blog.tigerpens.co.uk/skilcraft-pens-writing-instruments-of-the-us-govt/