Good Thing They Didn't Leave Milk

[CAPTAINZING2000]

DURANGO, Colo. (Reuters) - A Colorado judge ordered two teen-age girls to pay about $900 for the distress a neighbor said they caused by giving her home-made cookies adorned with paper hearts.



The pair were ordered to pay $871.70 plus $39 in court costs after neighbor Wanita Renea Young, 49, filed a lawsuit complaining that the unsolicited cookies, left at her house after the girls knocked on her door, had triggered an anxiety attack that sent her to the hospital the next day.


Taylor Ostergaard, then 17, and Lindsey Jo Zellitte, 18, paid the judgment on Thursday after a small claims court ruling by La Plata County Court Judge Doug Walker, a court clerk said on Friday.


The girls baked cookies as a surprise for several of their rural Colorado neighbors on July 31 and dropped off small batches on their porches, accompanied by red or pink paper hearts and the message: "Have a great night."


The Denver Post newspaper reported on Friday that the girls had decided to stay home and bake the cookies rather than go to a dance where there might be cursing and drinking.


It reported that six neighbors wrote letters entered as evidence in the case thanking the girls for the cookies.


But Young said she was frightened because the two had knocked on her door at about 10:30 p.m. and run off after leaving the cookies.


She went to a hospital emergency room the next day, fearing that she had suffered a heart attack, court records said.


The judge awarded Young her medical costs, but did not award punitive damages. He said he did not think the girls had acted maliciously but that 10:30 was fairly late at night for them to be out.

[CAPTAINZING2000]

Among recent troubling news: After Rafer Wilson crashed into a parked car in Sydney, Australia, his blood-alcohol content (according to evidence at his trial in December) was tested at an almost death-defying .462, nine times the legal presumption of impairment. (Three weeks later, in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, doctors said a 67-year-old man had produced a blood-alcohol reading of .914, which supposedly stood up through four re-tests, and have stuck with the story despite worldwide alarm.) And Gary W. Rodgers was arrested in November in Lexington, Ky., and according to the county's offender database, it was his 96th arrest for public drunkenness in 2004. [News Limited (Sydney), 12-17-04] [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News, 1-4-05] [Lexington-Fayette Urban County Division of Community Corrections, 11-16- 04]

A 34-year-old man performing a field sobriety test for a police officer alongside Route 130 in Bordentown, N.J., was killed when a tractor-trailer driver (who police said had probably been drinking) lost control and smashed into him (December). (The officer jumped out of the way in time.) And a 40-year-old New York City man was killed when, inebriated, he fell and broke a fish tank, fatally slashing an artery; he had recently purchased the tank to help his girlfriend's kids learn responsibility (December). And a 47-year-old man was crushed to death in Albany, Ga., when the tree he was cutting down fell on top of him (December). [Trentonian, 12-19-04] [New York Post, 1-1-05] [Atlanta Journal Constitution-AP, 12-22-04