Haircuts a’ la Sweeney Todd not for the faint of heart
I live in a rather large town just north of Dallas. When I first came to Denton in 1975 to attend college the population was roughly 36,000 people, and lot of those were the students at Texas Women’s University and my alma mater, the University of North Texas (then known under a “lesser” title as North Texas State University). Today the population has nearly quadrupled with over a 124,000 according to the recent 2010 census and incorporated land mass I suspect has doubled.
Yet there are parts of Denton that still harbor that small town feel. It has the 19th century style town square with the Victorian architecture on its 3 story courthouse. We have a popular state fair that brings in 4H and FFA contestants across the state and there is also a local paper, the Denton Record-Chronicle. Characteristically of a small town newspaper, the Record-Chronicle still posts the daily police records referred to as “The Blotter” on page two, detailing mostly mundane and normal occurrences that the police department responds to.
On occasion though there is the report that is outside the norm and has a life of its own. Take the one in today’s edition about the wife and grandmother whose alleged efforts to trim her unsuspecting husband’s hair brought an assault charge from her grand-daughter.
Seriously, here’s the link to the report lest you think I engaged in my morning ritual of reading the paper before I was fully awake. According to the report , the daughter who was staying with her grandparents at 2600 Augusta Dr. heard shouts for help from her grand-father. When entering the room where they were she found her grandmother on top of grand-dad “trying to stab him with the scissors”. It’s not clear if they were on the floor jostling or in a chair that perhaps grand-dad had dozed off in.
According to the police report “In the struggle, her grandmother tried to stab her as well, the granddaughter told police. When the granddaughter was able to get the woman away from the victim, the grandmother kicked him in the arm, the report states. Then the grandmother got in her car and drove away.”
Apparently by the time the police had arrived there was no suspect and perhaps no weapon at the “scene of the crime”. This perhaps led the attending officer to question the sincerity and the facts of the victims and as a result was given a cell phone number to the grandmother. When the officer made contact with the would-be scissor attacker the grandmother gave a perfectly “rational” explanation of what transpired. Rational of course if you accept that there were cuts and bruises on the victims and grandma had fled the scene to Oklahoma.
This entire incident took on the serious role it normally should with someone’s life being threatened and the actions of an apparent crazed woman fleeing the scene. But what follows takes this story to a different level, a more comical nature and leaves all realizing that fact is always (sometimes humorously) stranger than fiction.
“The whole thing was a misunderstanding” the grandmother insisted. “I was merely trying to cut my husband’s hair” she testified to the officer over the phone. However, it appears that granddad viewed it more in terms of a scalping rather than a haircut. A metaphor that many a dissatisfied recipient has accused relatives of for trying to get a trim job on the cheap.
Grandma’s not allowed to cut my hair!
From a reporter’s point of view, this story is very believable! I used to have to go to the police stations on my beat each day for the reports which I would post on the blotter page. The stories were outrageous and the way the police officers wrote the reports would make everyone in the newsroom crack up. We would read them aloud and rate who had the best blotter post.