Odd Crimes in Philadelphia

I don't know why or where it was brought up, but I was made aware of a wave of elderly criminals. Is our state of economy really doing that bad? It was reported that last June, a man in his late 60s to early 70s showed up bright and early in his baseball cap, big sunglasses, khakis and Timberland boots and robbed a Citizens Bank with a pillowcase to collect his dough. He escaped on foot and got away with it.



Another report in La Jolla, San Diego an old man around the same age who wearing an argyle sweater and a sport jacket robbed a bank last September robbed a bank while he was carrying an inhaler and an oxygen tank. There is also another report of a similar case in Florida. Elderly gone wild? I guess maybe they got ducked by social security and all the other retirement plans they had. I'm just very surprised by elderly bank robbers, I mean how fast can they run anyway?

From the old, we'll go to the young spectrum where the Lower Merion School District has given out computers to their students and after losing 80 laptops, they have secretly activated the cameras on all laptops in an effort to recover the missing laptops. It wasn't until a student noticed the red light on the laptop that the students realized that they were being monitored. Over a period of two years, they have taken 56,000 photos of the students. This couldn't possibly be legal. A 16 year-old claimed that there's at least 400 pictures of him in various stages of undress. Since a lot of them are hormonal teenagers, I can only imagine what some of the photos could be.

To the more serious spectrum of things, we have two shocking road rage case in the past week. First a 47 year-old firefighter and his 21 year-old son drove up to an intersection where they got into an argument with a 54 year-old man about the right of way. The verbal argument turned into a physical altercation in which the father and son slammed the pedestrian into the ground, punched and kicked him. The pedestrian ended up in a coma for 13 days. A portion of the man's skull was removed to alleviate brain swelling and he also suffered a broken nose and clavicle. He later died in the hospital.

Another case involve a 50 year-old engineer with a gun license. You know how this one goes, with a spark of road rage, he started shooting at the car next to him with his handgun hitting the female driver once at her knee and once at her elbow. The engineer had a history of anger issue, speeding and reckless driving and somehow people gave him a gun license. He called his lawyer later on and surrendered himself to the authorities. He spent two days in jail, got bailed out and shot himself with a rifle and a bottle of Oxycotin and Percocet each.

I guess they all work in high stress jobs. One thing I can never understand, especially since I don't drive, is what can you accomplish by speeding. You're already in a car, you're going fast, speeding might save you 15 minutes. Running a red light might save you 3 minutes, driving to the edge of the street blocking the zebra crossing saves you zilch. So you get home or your destination 20 minutes earlier, you'll just spend it in front of the TV or something, so what's the point? The downside of it is fines, causing accidents or inconvenience for pedestrians, general rudeness and bad feelings. Is it really worth it? Worse, look at these guys either ending up in jail or killing themselves, how does it justify anything? And by the by, who brings a gun while driving? You're actively looking for trouble. It's just another example of Philadelphia being the capital of gun violence. We seriously need gun control.