Transit-worker impersonator tries to steal locomotive
New York A man who has been arrested repeatedly for pretending to be a transit worker pleaded guilty Thursday to trying to steal a locomotive, prosecutors said.
In June, Darius McCollum, 39, went into a Long Island Rail Road yard, posed as a safety consultant and asked how to operate a new type of engine that had just been delivered, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said in a news release.
McCollum later was found with stolen keys, including one used to operate the new locomotive, Brown said.
He pleaded guilty to third-degree attempted grand larceny and faces up to three years in prison when he is sentenced March 28. A telephone message left at the office of his lawyer was not immediately returned.
McCollum has been arrested 20 times for illegally posing as a subway motorman, bus driver or transit token taker. When he was arrested in the June incident, he was on parole after serving prison time for his last arrest.
Bus hijacker sentenced to prison
Salt Lake City A man who hijacked a Greyhound bus in Utah with the goal of taking it hundreds of miles to Nebraska to run over his estranged wife’s trailer home was sentenced Wednesday to eight years and one month in prison.
Antonio Hernandez, 30, pleaded guilty in December to carjacking. He said in a court statement that he thought his wife was cheating on him. Both lived in Lexington, Neb.
The bus had left Green River, Utah, with 59 passengers and was headed along Interstate 70 toward Colorado when Hernandez commandeered the vehicle last May.
He allegedly stabbed an off-duty driver in the hand and put the knife to the driver’s throat. No passengers were hurt.
Hernandez was captured just west of the Colorado state line after a half-hour standoff with the Utah Highway Patrol. He told authorities he had been drinking tequila.
By the time the bus reached the state line, Hernandez had ordered everyone off but the driver, who slowed the vehicle and jumped out as Hernandez walked toward the back to use the restroom, authorities said.
Manure pile fire finally extinguished
Milford, Neb. It took nearly four months, but to the relief of neighbors for miles around, a burning manure pile has been extinguished.
David Dickinson, owner and manager of Midwest Feeding Co., said Wednesday that several weeks of pulling the 2,000-ton pile apart proved effective by late last week.
“We got far enough through it, that it quit,” Dickinson said.
Dickinson’s feedlot, about 20 miles west of Lincoln, takes in as many as 12,000 cows at a time from farmers and ranchers and fattens them for market.
Byproducts from the massive operation resulted in a dung pile measuring 100 feet long, 30 feet high and 50 feet wide. Heat from the decomposing manure deep inside the pile is believed to have eventually ignited the pile.
The Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality told Dickinson that his smoldering dung pile violated clean-air laws and it worked with him to extinguish it.