Free Republic

SWAMPSCOTT — A middle-school student had the ends of two of his fingers blown off yesterday by a homemade bomb that went off inside his Melvin Avenue home, authorities said. The victim's brother said rescue workers could find only one of the fingertips. The 13-year-old victim, identified by family and neighbors as Joel Surette, was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston by ambulance. "First, he was screaming for five minutes," said his brother, Michael, 17, "He said, 'I can't believe I blew off my fingers.'" Joanne Schumann, who lives two houses from the Surettes, was eating dinner with her...

Tony Thornton Staff Writer MUSKOGEE — In normal circumstances, tonight's game between two of the state's top football teams should be capturing all of Muskogee football coach Matt Hennesy's attention. Instead, he was dealing with the fallout from a Thursday evening accident in which a 7-year-old boy's bike ran into the coach's car, which was pulling to a stop before leaving a parking lot. The boy, Chase Thornton, suffered a broken collarbone, a knot on his head and road rash on a leg and shoulder. The coach suffered a sullied reputation. A story in Friday's Muskogee Phoenix quoted Hennesy as...

Fourteen-year-old James Watkins says he was just trying to be funny. And, he says, plenty of other kids and passers-by thought it was funny, too. Steilacoom school officials didn’t. They suspended the teen for three days for what Watkins considered a hilarious practical joke: wearing an inflatable penis costume on school grounds. James, a Pioneer Middle School eighth-grader, donned the outfit and showed it off to teens at a Saturday night homecoming dance at Steilacoom High School on Oct. 8. He and a friend, clad in regular clothes, didn’t go into the dance, but walked near the school entrance and...