People with loose bowels, beware. Anyone who doesn’t fully trust the integrity of their gastrointestinal system would be well-advised to stay far away from federal buildings. (Also, anyone squeamish about fecal matters — or eating lunch — may want to proceed with caution as they read this.)
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld a conviction against a Maine man who served a seven-day jail sentence for willfully damaging and creating a hazard and nuisance in the federal courthouse in Portland. Specifically, he pooped his pants and then left a mess in the bathroom after attempting to clean himself up.
And what a mess. The poor maintenance worker who had to deal with it said that “seventy-five percent of the floor was covered in feces” while more was “smeared more than two feet up on the walls” and “on the paper towel and toilet paper dispensers, on the toilet paper itself, and on part of the toilet seat and the left side of the toilet bowl,” according to the opinion.
The outrageously graphic 57-page court document, written by distinguished judges who sit one level below the U.S. Supreme Court, includes vivid comparisons to spaghetti with meat sauce and chunky peanut butter. There are also photos of the bathroom where the crime took place, though mercifully after it had already been cleaned.
So what went wrong? Ronald Strong, who said he was 50 at the time and had a heart condition that required medication that may have affected his bowel control, arrived at the courthouse on business for an unrelated civil case. As he was being screened by security, he informed the guard that he had to use the bathroom, and then that he was defecating in his pants. The guard escorted him to the restroom “with Strong intermittently trailing feces on the floor” which he later described as “liquid and there was pieces in it” that dripped down his leg “all the way to my ankles.”
Once safe in the bathroom, he took his clothes off, cleaned up the best he could, throwing his boxers away because they were destroyed: “I mean, how could I carry them home?” he testified. “What was I going to put them in? I mean, it was covered in feces, there was — I mean, what was – I mean, I had my briefcase, I mean, what was I supposed to do with them? I threw them in the trash.”
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