When he cut through the 36-inch wide trunk, the tree fell onto part of his own apartment building. “He decided it was the best thing to do, to get rid of the tree, where he thought it was going to go, I don't know,” said Terry Best, a Pittston Township code enforcement officer. Authorities condemned the building in Pittston Township, and five people have to find new places to stay. Rick Woods also lived in the apartment house until it was condemned.
When the tree fell, Woods was in his apartment, sitting on his couch, watching TV. All of a sudden, he heard a big crash. “I thought a tractor trailer lost his brakes and ran into something, not realising it was the house,” he said. Police said Mazzarella was then checked out at a hospital. Upon his release on Monday afternoon, a neighbour saw Mazzarella trespassing near the apartment house and called police. When the neighbour confronted him, Mazzarella punched him. The neighbour pulled out a stun gun to protect himself.
YouTube link.
Mazzarella then started hitting him with a baseball bat. Mazzarella is charged with assault and harassment and is locked up in the Luzerne County jail on $10,000 bail. The Red Cross is helping the others who lived in the apartment building with temporary places to stay. That's all Woods is hoping for. “I find a place to live. That's about it,” he said. Officials aren't sure when or if people will be allowed back in the building because the foundation has shifted. “It's going to be a long time before somebody gets back in here,” Best said.
5 comments:
From wikipedia, Carol M. Cipolla's 5 laws of stupidity (translated from the original Italian, thus not quite as crisp in English as they might be):
1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Especially note law #5. This is why, e.g., a corrupt politician is much less damaging than a stupid one who is certain about his/her positions.
Lurker111
Is Pennsylvania becoming the northern Florida? I hpe not, because my youngest daughter and her family live there.
@Barbwire: I've heard it that you have Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and then in the middle, North Alabama.
Lurker111
Well, it's Appalachia--hillbillies, I guess.
Heh heh, I found Waldo. And he's a bad neighbor.
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