Susan Smith was not present at the funeral of her two young sons this past Sunday. She remained behind bars and charged with the boys’ murder. Smith’s confession, which was obtained by CNN, reported that she too intended to go into the lake as well. “I wanted to end my life so bad and was in my car ready to go....” Smith said. About 300 people crowded into the church to attend the service.
One day after President Ronald Regan announced that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease, the pastor at the former president’s church praised him for making his condition public. Alzheimer’s is a non-reversible neurological disease that destroys the brain’s memory cells.
At least some of the alternate jurors yet to be picked for the O.J. Simpson murder trial are likely to play a key role in the trial, officials say. In the trial, expected to run six months, jurors may fall ill or encounter emergencies that will force them to drop out. Judge Lance Ito has asked for 15 alternates which is an unusually large number. Today Ito is to rule on whether to allow cameras to televise the trial.
Sunny today with highs in the upper 70s; lows in the 50s tonight with fair skies. Currently, at 7:02, it’s 57 degrees.
My freshman year was apparently one for the books as far as the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice was concerned. Early in the semester, tenured CCJ professor Dr. Henbane was arrested for lewd behavior at a highway rest stop and soon after a handful of students were arrested for credit card fraud.
An article in the student-published Screed quoted a law enforcement official who said the investigation had begun back in 1990 and it was only now, four years later, before any arrests could be made. It was the arrests that surely made the CCJ people happy: of the twelve students arrested, four were sons or daughters of police officers and CCJ majors. The other eight people were business majors, a fact quickly overlooked, so it seemed, by those who found CCJ majors being arrested delightfully ironic and, rightfully so, embarrassing.
This, though, was the tip of the iceberg, as further reports indicated there were as many as 50 people involved in what police dubbed a “pick clique” rather than organized scam. I remember this term – “Pick Clique” – being something that garnered some laughs from my peers. Why couldn’t the police just call this a “crime ring” or “circuit” and be done with it, instead of coming up with some artsy-fartsy rhyming term?
Members of this “Pick Clique,” which the paper said represented both sexes and several races, stole credit cards, checks, and student identification cards from cars, purses, backpacks, lockers, dorm rooms, and so on. There was little difficulty finding members of the clique that looked like the students who had been robbed, which made using the stolen items a cinch. Officials said that the clique then found their friends with jobs who would accept the stolen checks or credit cards, and later “forget” who used them.
Overall the story seemed to hit more emotions than the story of Dr. Henbane did, if only because it was current and past CCJ students. The general consensus of the students interviewed in the Screed and the Examiner was that these four people should be embarrassed for representing not just the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice – where it was said students should be held to a greater and higher moral standard – but the university as well. There were some students under the auspices that all the students should be removed from the university though I don’t think that came about. Chances are those arrested weren’t going to be receiving passing marks in their classes that semester anyway. I doubt you could do distance education courses from the county lock-up.
Besides being mentioned in our radio newscasts, this story, too, made for easy banter during DJs shifts just as Dr. Henbane’s ordeal had. I must admit that the DJs my freshman year really made a point of keeping their eyes and ears open to university news. In later years DJs mumbled through music shifts with scant interest in talking about something other than music or themselves. There was a goldmine of topics to find in the Screed. We just needed to take the time to find them!
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Sold Out
(unknown)
Pocket Change with David Patt
From the album Intimate Notions
1991