| Submit your comments on this article |
| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Mental patient steals ambulance to carry dead deer |
| 2005-10-03 |
| An escaped mental patient, on the run from Florida, stole an ambulance in North Carolina last Sunday and led police on a three-county chase, passing briefly into Virginia. When the cops finally pulled him over, he emerged — somewhat less than voluntarily — wearing a stethoscope around his neck, a pager on his waist and latex gloves in his back pocket, and sporting a Mohawk haircut. "I don't think anyone would have mistaken him for a doctor," Rockingham County (N.C.) Sheriff's Officer Dean Venable told The Reidsville (N.C.) Review. I dunno. Sounds like one I went to for a while. Even stranger, somewhere along the way he'd picked up a patient — a dead male deer, lying in the back of the ambulance with an intravenous tube stuck into it. A defibrillator may also have been used on the animal. "Come on, Bambi, Live. Clear! [ka-chunk] Live, damn you! "I don't know how the man got it up in there," Sgt. Robert Pearson of the North Carolina State Highway Patrol (search) told the Jacksonville (Fla.) Times-Union. "It was a six point buck." Even worse, it had been dead for somewhere around a week. Police think it must have been road kill the driver just came across. "I smelled that deer until 10 o'clock that night," said Pearson. It turned out Leon Hollimon Jr., 37, had escaped from a mental-health facility in Jacksonville, Fla., in mid-August and not been heard from until last Saturday, Sept. 24. That's when Lexington, N.C., police arrested him as he hung around the town hospital in a wheelchair. "Actually he was in the wheelchair, riding it in the middle of the road and intoxicated," Lt. Scott Nanney told WFMY-TV of Greensboro, N.C. "So that's when officers decided to take him into jail for four hours." The next morning, Hollimon allegedly stole the vehicle from Davidson County Ambulance Service (search), but it wasn't spotted until early that afternoon, when police in Danville, Va., 80 miles away, noticed it but didn't give chase. Hollimon's father told WAWS-TV of Jacksonville his son was a paranoid schizophrenic who had stabbed his two sisters and a brother in the past. North Carolina authorities told the Review that Hollimon had arrests and convictions for petty crimes stretching from Florida to New Jersey. "It's about the most bizarre thing I've ever seen," the tow truck driver who |
| Posted by:Jackal |
| #5 There was a lawyer who did this once as well. I think he was from Massachusetts. A buck for a doe. Andrea |
| Posted by: ANdrea Jackson 2005-10-03 16:20 |
| #4 It sounds like Saturday Night Live! Andrea |
| Posted by: ANdrea Jackson 2005-10-03 16:18 |
| #3 ..or ran out of acupuncture needles. |
| Posted by: Red Dog 2005-10-03 16:10 |
| #2 He didn't stab 'em it was exploratory surgery. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-10-03 16:06 |
| #1 Now that's a wonderful S.A.S.T. story on R'burg. Brings a tear to my eye. Sniff. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2005-10-03 15:56 |