Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Arson at recruiting station
Remember that fire earlier this week at the military recruiting center in Regent Park? Investigators say it was arson.
Somebody used a flammable liquid to start the blaze. Nobody was injured, but the recruiting offices were shut down for a day, as was the regional office for the state lottery. This could be an interesting story if it develops.
Clerk takes ticket
Police in Sylva arrested a convenience store clerk and charged her with obtaining property by false pretense after she took an old man’s winning scratch-off lottery ticket.
Russ “Beefcake” Bowen went out to Sylva to bring us the tale. The old dude, Cecil, bought a ticket at the Mountain Breeze Mart, scratched it and thought he won $1,200. The clerk told Cecil the machine that reads the tickets was down, so she’d hang onto it.
Well, the ticket was worth $21,000 and the clerk allegedly gave it to her boyfriend, who cashed it in. Cecil started asking questions about his ticket, police picked up on it and the boyfriend apparently cooperated with them.
So where’s the money now? The case has to go to court before Cecil can get his cash, according to the story.
Rally against racism
There was a rally against racism in downtown Ashvegas Thursday night. WLOSers sent a cameraman, who talked to Oralene Simmons and brought back pictures of people talking and singing. The rally came in response to someone throwing flyers all over Martin Luther King Boulevard a couple of weeks ago threatening to beat up “n-words.”
Hey, where’s my furniture?
*Carolyn “Little Red” Ryan pointlessly dialed a phone and pulled on a locked door to drive home her story of the day – that the Rooms for Less furniture store has closed and people who have purchased furniture are getting the run-around.
Carolyn talked to one woman who spent $5,000 but hasn’t seen a stick of furniture. Carolyn talked to the Better Business Bureau lady, who said yup, we’ve gotten 17 complaints but can’t do anything about it.
As a sideline, we would be remiss if we didn’t give Carolyn (or her producers) a shout-out for readiing the Ashvegas blog and doing a story. Ashvegas posted a story about the filming of the independent movie “A Dance for Bethany,” then WLOSers went out, tracked ’em down and did a story. It was kinda ironic to watch Carolyn do a story on a woman who plays an investigative reporter in a movie.
Grenade found
WLOSers brought us the non-story of an old farmer who found a grenade in his barn. Great quotes from the farmer made this one.
The good ol’ boy said that when he spotted it, he did what any old war veteran would do, he said he kicked it. Then he joked that terrorists probably wouldn’t want to blow up his barn. They he called the cops, who came out, put the grenade in a field and blew it up.
The farmer said he thinks his percocious puppy probably picked up the grenade, which looked like it had been stuffed in a beer coozie before being discarded. It would have been said if the pup had pulled the pin, the farmer said matter-of-factly.
The cops have contacted Fort Bragg and will try to determine where the grenade came from. It had a date of 1962 stamped on it.
Stereotpyical posters
Jon “Punnyman” Le, whose puns have largely been silenced, brought us a story about a new Asheville-Buncombe Drug Commission poster that one liberal says just continues an old stereotype.
The drug commission created a series of posters in its ongoing effort to fight illegal drug activity. One poster shows how a woman’s face aged horribly after using meth, for example. The poster in question shows a blurry image of a big-bootied hooker leaning into the passenger-side window of a car to ply her trade, with the wording: “It’s scary what you’ll end up selling for your hard drugs.”
Le talked to the woman in charge of Our Voice, an agency that serves victims of sex abuse and such. The woman said the poster over-simplifies a complex problem.
Then Le took the poster to a drug commission spokeswoman who said the poster depicts reality. “It’s true,” she said.
Yup. That was the story.
Bear hunt, country style
In celebrity news, Troy Gentry of the country music superstar duo Montgomery Gentry, is charged with killing a tame bear with a bow and arrow two years ago. Gentry apparently bought the bear, then put it on some land that was a couple of fenced-in acres. The whole thing was videotaped, and the tape edited to look like Gentry chased the bear down and killed it. Here’s the story.
In other news…
Kids went back to school… and Larry “Gloryhole” Blunt tried to correctly pronounce the name of some variety of blue-tongued skink.
Carolyn Ryan has a great ass. Cheers to the camera man on the Rooms for less story! 😀
It should be noted that "Rooms For Less" spends a lot of money advertising on WLOS. I wonder if that’ll have any influence on the way the story is covered?
Think a little highly of ourselves, do we, Ash? With signs reading "A Dance for Bethany" all over town for weeks, articles in magazines and newspapers, Web sites (this one, as well as the producers’ own site, and others), the idea had to come from here? I know, it’s called sarcasm.