A thirsty thief, driving while diabetic and the search for wife-swapping rednecks

The beat goes on in crazy Mack-Dowell County, a breeding ground for news of the weird like you wouldn’t believe. All this can be found at the local McDowell newspaper here.

Here’s a sampling:

Thristy thief

Some dude who was apparently thirsty as hell stole a Sierra Mist van and led police on a chase through Marion this past week. Is driving while dry really a crime?

The van was reported stolen from an Ashvegas Ingles grocery store. City dispatchers notified the good folks in Marion, where Officer J.E. Lipe spotted the brightly colored van in town. He chased it all over creation until the thief couldn’t go any further because of a train on the tracks on one Hankins Road.

Police busted 43-year-old Devlin Lorenzo Neal. Along with a bunch of driving infractions, the cops also found that he was wanted in connection with taking a home theater package from Wal-Mart.

At least the guy had good taste.

Potty break (in)

When McDowell County deputies responded to a break-in call at Nebo Elementary School, they did a quick search and found one of the suspects on a toilet in one of the bathrooms. Bad time for a potty break-in. The dumbass had his buddy waiting for him outside with an escape vehicle – a moped.

Driving while diabetic

All the fat diabetics running around the mountains are getting to be a pain in the ass for local police. For the second time in just a few weeks, the cops pulled over an erratic driver who turned out to be a diabetic having an attack.

The cops chased the crazy driver, who was blasting into construction barrels on Sugar Hill Road. Once they stopped him and figured out he was diabetic, a cop popped a lolly in the guy’s mouth and he immediately started to come around.

A couple of weeks ago, deputies and State Highway Patrol troopers pepper-sprayed James “Big Daddy” Henry, 76, yanked him from his vehicle and pushed his face in the mud after they stopped him for erratic driving. Turns out he was diabetic and was wearing a diabetic’s necklace to alert emergency workers.

Red light bandit?

A Fayette-nam firefighter was so hot about an alleged fender-bender that he tried to use his red light to stop a motorist on I-40 recently.

The State Highway Patrol got a call from a woman complaining about a possible “red light bandit.” Cops stopped 22-year-old Edward Charles Henning, who was driving a Chevy Lumina, and charged him with the unlawful use of a red light. He said the woman hit his car, so he followed and flashed his lights to alert her that she had been involved in a wreck.

Punk.

Wife-swapping rednecks wanted

In an unusual pairing, the McDowell News has teamed up with a reality TV show “Wife Swap” to encourage some bored rednecks to sign up for the show.

The newspaper says the TV show contacted it. So the newspaper decided it was going to host its own contest, and started taking applications from families. The newspaper asked for a family photo and said it would do interviews, then readers would decide the “best” family to represent Mack-Dowell County.

The TV folks buttered up the newspaper crew, saying that a North Carolina family has yet to make the show, and that they liked Southerners:

“We love people from the South. They make for great TV,” said Wendy Roth, executive producer of “Wife Swap,” which is based in New York but films across the nation. “Southern families are spunky, and they speak their minds.”

Read that to say: “We really love rednecks. They’re losers and they don’t know when the hell to shut their pieholes, so they make the best tee-vee.”

We’ll keep tabs on this one. Hell, we might even join up. Here’s the story.