CEO for a software reseller my then-wife used to work for was a complete slimeball. Cooking books, double charging credit cards, etc. He was an LDS bishop and brought in one of his pals from church as the new CFO, and the two of them started skimming cash right off the top.
All would have been fine except the guy who started the business, and whom they were buying out in installments, kept his fingers in the operation and when he noticed revenue going down but sales going up, brought in an outside auditor.
He filed embezzlement and fraud charges against them and the case went federal because of the fraudulent credit card charges in multiple states. Their perp walk was on the local news.
I knew a kid that grew up to murder his mom. He was such a nice little boy.
In lighter events, I was standing on later next door to a building that blew up. Some idiots were welding/cutting on an empty fuel tanker truck and they flashed the vapors which flattened the shop.
The building went boom. Meanwhile, I ducked… standing about 12 feet off the ground!
Other than the workers being deafened, nobody was hurt. They were sheltered because they were laying on the ground between two sets of tires.
Depending on the location and how slow the news day is, you can get in the news for really minor stuff, and avoid the news for major stuff.
A guy I grew up with got busted as a teenager for stealing hood ornaments, and got on the front page of the newspaper; it happened in a suburb and on a slow news day. A few years later, he and a friend shot two children (killing one) who they thought were messing with their cars (stealing hood ornaments?). It took place in Indianapolis proper and on a busy news day, and it didn’t make the news.
The neighbors of my in-laws unfortunately were in the news a decade ago for a multiple-murder/suicide; a man shot and killed his infant children and his girlfriend, then himself. Sadly, none of us were really surprised.
In my apartment complex, a puppy got stabbed a while back, and it was in the newspaper and on television for weeks, while a man who had a night-long armed stand-off with police and killed himself after police shot in tear gas and kicked in the door earned almost no coverage whatsoever.
I’ve posted this before, but David Copeland, who set off three bombs in London in 1999 and killed three people, was in my year (and some of my classes) at school. He lived in the next street from me.
By coincidence, I was also drinking at a pub a few hundred yards from the third bomb when it went off.
I knew a guy, Jeremy Duffer, who made the news a couple of times.
He worked in a game store nearby, which is how I knew him. A lot of kids would hang out in the backroom playing Pokemon, D&D and other games. Turns out Jeremy was hanging out with at least one of the boys in inappriate ways. The child told his mother, and Jeremy was arrested on charges of child rape. He was placed under house arrest with an ankle bracelet to await trial.
Then he escaped! He cut off the bracelet and got away. There was a big manhunt and he was on billboards and America’s Most Wanted. They caught him a few months later working at a traveling carnival in eastern Tennessee.
He’s in jail now - he was sentenced to 137 years. I know raping a boy is pretty abhorrent, but 137 years seemed a little excessive to me for someone who clearly needed mental help. But at least he won’t be abusing any more kids.
My neighbor across the street became the first civilian ever shot by the police in the history of my town. His wife called the police during a domestic violence incident, he was drunk and tried to get at a knife on the counter in their kitchen, and in the subsequent struggle was trying to get one officer’s pistol out of the holster. He ignored pepper spray and repeated warnings (he was really drunk) and one of the cops shot him.
It not only made the news, it got me on the news - I was interviewed on one of our local news stations.
The Laurie Kellogg case happened not just in my town, but in my former neighborhood. We had moved by the time the murder happened. Free Laurie Kellogg
Laurie was in the same class as my sister in high school, her stepdaughter (the daughter of the victim, her husband Bruce) was in my class. They made a TV movie out of it starring Jennie Garth. One of the conspirators, Nicole Pappas, was just a year older than me (and Bruce’s daughter). It was widely known that Bruce was a bastard, but the actual circumstances surrounding his death are still widely debated. The largest detail being did Laurie put the teenagers up to it or did she not know they were going to kill him.
An high-school acquaintance, someone I knew but not really a friend, was big into hunting. Of course since I grew up in central PA a lot of kids were, but he was kind of known for it. His favorite thing to do in life was to go hunting with his older brother, who was really like his best friend in the world.
I came home from college over one weekend and was watching the local news. Top story was about my high-school acquaintance, who had accidentally shot someone in a hunting accident. The victim was his older brother.
Someone I knew as a teen killed himself rather than letting the police catch him. He was also believed to have shot and killed the local grocer in an attempted robbery the day before Christmas.
I used to run around with a guy who was convicted (IIRC) of kidnapping and extortion. He got the idea from the movie Crazy Larry and Dirty Mary. I think that was the title. The guy I knew was basically a career criminal with a sideline in gambling.
I had a copyright professor in law school who I remained in contact with after graduation. I hired some of his copyright students as unpaid interns in the years following my graduation, and I came to speak to a couple of his classes. Nice guy. He wrote a book on copyright for the layperson; I went to his booksigning and I have an autographed copy.
Imagine my surprise when I read that he had just been arrested for possessing, on both his work and home computers, what was then the single largest collection of child pornography in New York State.
