This is not a rant, but I’m putting it in the Pit just in case.
Whether it’s right or not, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for the reaming out she got. Imagine how overworked and on edge the police and firefighters must have been at that time, and how their rage must have burst forth. She’ll get a fine or a prison term or both, of course, but I’m sure justice has already been served.
Maybe she has Munchausen syndrome. A form of it, anyway.
Ummm… Huh?
Some of us -me- aren’t up to speed on what you’re talking about.
I don’t know what her problem is but that was the most pitiful cry for attention that I ever heard of.
They were ratting off the charges on the news that were likely to be filed against her and it was not a short list.
Chris- don’t have a cite off-hand, but apparently a woman came up to the officers overseeing the reclamation process at the WTC. She was screaming and carrying on regarding a cell-phone call she had just gotten from her husband, who was trapped in the wreckage.
For six hours, a group of police officers and firefighters did whatever they could to extracate her husband, trying everything to figure out where he had called from. Then, she admitted she had made everything up.
I hope to God she is truly insane; I’ve seen far too much calculated exploitation of the recent disaster to be able to stomach any more.
Wow.
Something with that lady is fucked up. And since I’m not feeling very apologetic with people that are fucked up, I say throw her in a cell for a while.
Then get her some help.
Leagalize stoning, stone her, then outlaw it again.
That’s my view, and I’m damn smug about it.
I wonder if this was the same woman that our very own Cartooniverse described.
From an article in the Sept.15th NY Times:
She must be sick, but I don’t care. Make her dig in the rubble with her bare hands until it’s over. Such behavior is beyond perplexing… there’s no explanation, rational or otherwise, that comes to mind.
You know, I had the same thought. I don’t know what punishment she will get but I hope it will be enough to make people think twice before pulling such stunts.
Maybe putting some folks in stocks in a public square nest to huge piles of monkey crap would work. Those sicko’s who made bomb threats last week could join her. Then everyone could put on gloves and throw monkey crap at them, or better yet train monkeys to throw the crap at them for us.
No I’m not kidding.
That’s the best idea yet. Forget a cushy cell, she needs to know what it feels like to dig though tons of rubble and feel the hope fading away with every minute that goes by. She needs to work 22 hour shifts and nap on the site. She needs to breath asbestos and risk getting cancer. People like her make me sick and so enraged!
:::fans self::: I was right to put this in the Pit! Yes, I agree with all the punishments; maybe she could serve some combination of all of them. But I still think the initial punishment—getting ripped a new one by the emergency crew—must have been unbearable. And I hope it was.
Well, before we consign her to the deepest depths of hell to be tormented for eternity, I’d suggest we entertain the idea that it’s possible she was so severely traumatized by the attack and collapse of the buildings that she truly believed what she was saying at the time! Having cared for people involved in traumatic events, I’ve seen them become quite unconnected from reality for minutes or hours, and say and believe outrageous things, and try to act on those beliefs. Only to be appalled by their actions when they calmed down. This included a mother whose two children had been killed in an auto accident in front of her eyes, who spent the next hour or so calling the day-care center where her kids usually stayed, insisting on speaking with them.
What is this obsession with punishment, people? Let’s try a little compassion, at least until we have more facts. Then we can proceed with proper justice!
Qadgop, MD
Maybe. But she claimed her husband was the one who called her, and she didn’t have a husband, or a live-in SO. Can trauma go that far?
But you’re right, Qadgop, it does happen. There was a case about ten years ago where a man was murdered in New Hampshire (you may know the story, but I don’t feel like going into it). A woman called his parents, claiming she’d had a fling with him just before he was married, and now she had his baby. They were overjoyed to hear that he’d left a legacy (no kids with the wife who set him up), but again, it turned out she didn’t have a child at all, much less his.
I’m with Qadgop on this one.
In Search and Rescue, we study “victim behavior.” This woman’s actions aren’t unheard of, should she have been traumatized by the events.
We don’t really have enough details. We don’t know what this woman has seen, or where she’s been. As the friendly doc noted, she probably believed what she said, at the time.
If that’s the case, then we can’t condemn her to any layer of hell - it’s our duty as a community to see to it that she gets the help she needs.
(please don’t kill me!)
Elly, Field Medic, SAR K9 handler
Elen, for everyone’s sake, I hope you and Qadgop are right.
Sure it can. I wish it couldn’t, but I can even imagine myself into her shoes. Of course she was wrong. But if she’s given proper psychiatric treatment it should force her into confronting what she did, even if she’s sane to start out with.
Oh, we are such a mess.
Well, as long as we’re on the subject (sort of) of “untrue stuff dealing with WTC”, I’m gonna get this out of my system, which has been rankling all day.
Big headline on this website:
Dog Guides Man Down 70 WTC Floors
And you think, “Wow! Is that ever cool! Man’s best friend, and all that…”
Here’s what actually happened. It starts out promisingly enough–
–but then it all suddenly starts going downhill…
–and at this point you go, “–what?” You keep reading.
And you’re sitting there going, “Um?” You keep reading.
Okay, this really pisses me off. Let’s give a medal to the boss, for heaven’s sake, not the dog. Because the dog didn’t do diddly. But the boss who didn’t take to her heels and leave the blind fella to cope by himself, she’s the one who oughta be featured on a website somewhere.
This isn’t quite in the same league as the woman mentioned in the OP, but …
In a tiny town up near where I live, population of about 1,700, somebody phoned in a bomb threat to the USDA office.
It was of course bullshit. But it tied up local law enforcement who are in the midst of investigating a murder (a rare occurence up here), and shut down the nearby sheriff’s administration building for a good part of the day.
Also, because it involved a federal building, the FBI had to be called in on it.
At a time like this, with all the FBI has to do …
What is in some people’s heads?