Today’s TCT is all about a lack of control.
First up, via citypages.com, we find a patrol car responding to a “shots fired” call on Halloween night – instead of locating a shoot-out, however, they…
[…] found a group of juvenile boys, who said a man had driven up, pulled over and began to yell at them, accusing them of stealing candy from his child.
Candy theft is clearly a greater crime than pumpkin smashing, but neither is reason enough for vigilante justice – and yet:
The boys described the suspect as a white male with an Asian female passenger in his car, the same description of a driver who was stopped earlier in the evening for driving erratically. During that traffic stop, the driver, identified as Hager, told officers that he was looking for “older kids” who had stolen candy from his child.
Police went to Hager’s home and found him “very eager” to talk to them. He told them that he was angry that someone had stolen candy from his child, so he got into his car – accompanied by his wife and two children – and went searching for the “kids” who were responsible for the theft, according to the complaint.
I can understand being upset that your child has lost his candy, but there’s bullying and then there’s bullying.
When he saw the group at 27th and Brunswick, he got out of his car to confront them, he told police. However, it appeared that none of them were taking him seriously and they were giving him “attitude,” he said, so he pulled a gun from his car, the complaint says.
[…]
Police arrested Hager and confiscated the unloaded AK-47.
The second entry on today’s menu – a fantastic suggestion by Strawsburg – also relates to control: In fact, there was a time, not so long ago, when the criminal in question held at least some control over the vast majority of home computer systems.
Then things got a bit crazy.
From Gizmodo:
Antivirus pioneer John McAfee is on the run from murder charges, Belize police say. According to Marco Vidal, head of the national police force’s Gang Suppression Unit, McAfee is a prime suspect in the murder of American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was gunned down Saturday night at his home in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye.
[…] Last Wednesday, Faull filed a formal complaint against McAfee with the mayor’s office, asserting that McAfee had fired off guns and exhibited “roguish behavior.” Their final disagreement apparently involved dogs.
At first I thought perhaps he had simply finally found the fellow who wrote Sobig.F – but the rabbit hole goes much deeper.
“Belize?” you may be asking yourself, “why Belize?”
Writing under the name “stuffmonger,” a handle he has used on other online message boards, McAfee posted more than 200 times over the next nine months about his ongoing quest to purify psychoactive drugs from compounds commercially available over the internet. “I’m a huge fan of MDPV,” he wrote. “I think it’s the finest drug ever conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality, but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown.”
What does that have to do with Belize?
MDPV, which was recently banned in the US but remains legal in Belize, belongs to a class of drugs called cathinones, a natural source of which is the East African plant khat.
[…]
McAfee’s purported interest in extracting medicine from jungle plants provided him a wholesome justification for building a well-equipped chemistry lab in a remote corner of Belize. The specific properties of the drugs he was attempting to isolate also fit in well with what those closest to him have reported: that he is an enthusiastic amateur pharmacologist with a longstanding interest in drugs that induce sexual behavior in women. Indeed, former friends of McAfee have said he could be extremely persistent and devious in trying to coerce women who rebuff his advances to have sex with him.
Clearly Mr. McAfee is suffering from something that a simple software update won’t fix, though it sounds like he may also be carrying some viral infections of a different kind.
