Oddly enough

Oddly enough

Ohio school’s Indian statue now topless

AKRON

The massive wooden Indian chief outside an Ohio school is now without his headdress, and a more extensive makeover may be coming.

Crews used a crane Monday to remove the solid oak feathers from atop the “Chief Rotaynah” statue at Resnik Elementary in Akron.

School officials found their concerns about the safety of the 3,000-pound, 16-foot headpiece were justified. The Akron Beacon Journal reports that Monday’s operation revealed that water and termite damage left the feathers held in place by a chunk of wood only the size of a shoe’s heel.

The entire statue stands 36 feet tall and was carved by Florida-based artist Peter Wolf Toth in 1985. If school officials decide it can’t be saved, Toth has suggested he could carve another.

Man stuffs pennies in dime rolls in rip-off

MEYERSDALE, Pa.

A penny doesn’t go as far as it used to, but police in one southwestern Pennsylvania town say these pennies went too far.

That’s why police in Meyersdale are looking for the man who stuffed pennies into dime wrappers and used the rolls to buy merchandise at a Dollar General store on Monday.

The man put dimes on the ends of each roll so the cashier wouldn’t realize they were otherwise filled with pennies. A legitimate roll of dimes is worth $5 and this man used eight rolls — meaning the clerk believed the man had paid $40 when, in fact, the rolls contained a fraction of that amount.

Police tell the Daily American of Somerset the man got away with the purchase before clerks realized what happened.

Pa. man on probation for cutting cable

PITTSBURGH

A mentally ill Pittsburgh man with a history of alcohol and drug addiction will spend five years on probation for a drunken crime he claims he cannot remember: cutting a fiber optic cable that disrupted phone service to businesses and some federal offices.

Fifty-one-year-old Edward Szoszorek apologized Tuesday for cutting the Verizon line twice in about 12 hours on April 29, 2009, but still can’t explain it. Federal Public Defender Marketa Sims says she even took Szoszorek back to the crime scene in hopes that would jog his memory, but says that didn’t help.

Senior U.S. District Judge Gustave Diamond was required to order the defendant to repay the $197,000 cost of repairing the line, even though the judge acknowledged the debt won’t be repaid given the defendant’s low disability income.