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In February police in Oakland, California, sought a con man who preyed on female immigrants by telling them over the phone that he was “from a clinic,” that they carried a rare germ requiring special treatment, and that they would be deported if they weren’t treated. The special treatment was that the “doctor” would have himself injected with a serum (for which the immigrant had to pay $650), which could then only be passed to the victim through sexual intercourse.
Axel Bremermann, 31, who has multiple sclerosis, was convicted in February in North Bay, Ontario, of sexual assault. A woman had testified that while she was in Bremermann’s apartment he pinned her to a wall with his motorized scooter and forced her to take her clothes off and perform fellatio on him.
Kathleen Finney, a nurse at a maximum-security institution for the criminally insane in Ontario, was recently reprimanded by the Ontario College of Nurses for overzealously monitoring her patients’ personal property. She had confiscated blueprints of the institution’s grounds (depicting escape routes) from a patient, but the college pointed out that the patient had obtained the blueprints legally under Canada’s freedom of information act and that Finney had no right to take them. (In May she was cleared of wrongdoing.)
John E. Garrett, 19, was arrested in January in Baltimore after putting up a large sign on the side of a newspaper box, announcing the sale of $10 bags of marijuana. Two plainclothes officers happened to see the sign and asked Garrett if it was his. “Sure,” he said. “It’s the only way I can get people to stop.”
