oddly enough

oddly enough

Woman finds snake in couch brought home from curb

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.

A woman who brought home a secondhand couch left on the curb in western Michigan says she ended up finding a snake apparently living under the cushions.

Holly Wright tells WZZM-TV that the couch had been in her Grand Rapids bedroom for about two months before the “very lethargic” snake emerged over the weekend. She says it died before she could get care for the snake.

Wright says she isn’t sure where the snake came from, but it may have been there the whole time.

She says she thought the couch looked OK when she found it with a sign indicating that it was free for the taking. She says she took off the cushions and cleaned it but didn’t initially see the snake.

Brain samples stolen from Indiana medical museum

INDIANAPOLIS

A man who purportedly stole human brain samples from a medical-history museum was arrested after a California man who bought some of the tissue online alerted authorities.

David Charles, 21, was arrested Dec. 16 after investigators were tipped off by a San Diego man who became suspicious about six jars of brain tissue he’d bought on eBay for $600.

Charles faces theft and other charges. It wasn’t immediately clear whether he has an attorney.

Marion County court documents allege Charles broke into the Indiana Medical History Museum several times over the past year and stole jars of preserved human tissues, including brain samples, from long-dead psychiatric patients.

The museum is on the grounds of a former state psychiatric hospital, Central State Hospital, which closed in 1994. The museum’s director said the tissues are from autopsies spanning from roughly the 1890s to the 1940s.

“A museum’s mission is to hold these materials as cultural and scientific objects in the public interest. To have that disturbed — to have that broken — is extraordinarily disturbing to those of us in the museum field,” the museum’s executive director, Mary Ellen Hennessey Nottage, told The Indianapolis Star.

Indianapolis police had investigated several break-ins at the museum’s storage facility before the San Diego man helped lead police to Charles. That man called the Indianapolis museum after noticing labels on the containers that he bought on eBay, court documents state.

Indianapolis police detectives traced the transactions and eventually spoke to the seller. Police said that seller had obtained the brain matter from Charles.

Charles was arrested during a police sting after the eBay middleman arranged a meeting in a parking lot. Court documents state that the day before his arrest, Charles had stolen 60 jars of human tissue from the museum.

Associated Press