Retired Cop Shoots Fellow Moviegoer to Death Over Texting and a Thrown Bag of Popcorn

Chad Oulson was texting his toddler when the argument that ended his life started. Will his shooter claim he was "standing his ground?"

A 71-year-old retired police officer man in has been charged with second-degree murder after shooting another man to death over the latter"s texting in a movie theater. 

Curtis Reeves, the armed retired officer, became enraged when Chad Oulson would not stop texting, despite a request to do so. The argument escalated into a  shouting match and Oulson purportedly threw his bag of popcorn at Reeves, who promptly removed his .380 caliber gun from his pants pocket and fired one fatal shot into the man"s chest. Oulson"s wife, who attempted to shield her husband"s chest from the bullet with her hand, was also injured. 

The movie playing throughout the real-life carnage was “Lone Survivor,” about Navy SEALS in Afghanistan. 

Oulson was immediately taken to a Tampa-area hospital, where he died shortly after arrival.

Charles Cummings, a retired combat Marine in Vietnam, who witnessed the shooting with his son expressed his horrified bewilderment to the Associated Press. 

“I can"t believe people would bring a pistol, a gun, to a movie theater,” he said. “I can"t believe they would argue and fight and shoot one another over popcorn. Over a cellphone.” 

Also according to AP, Reeves told detectives after he was arrested that Oulson struck him in the face with an unknown object, and that he “was in fear of being attacked.” 

Defense attorneys are now speculating whether Reeves will be able to invoke Florida"s “Stand your ground” law in his defense, the infamous statute used to defend, and ultimately acquit George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. 

“Stand your ground does not limit it to just fear of death, stand your ground permits you to use deadly force if you think you"re abou tto suffer bodily harm,” said well known defense attorney Stephen Romine to KSDK. 

The next step in the case, say criminal law experts, will likely be the defense filing a stand your ground motion, at which point the judge will decide if the defense can be used. 

 

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Retired Cop Shoots Fellow Moviegoer to Death Over Texting and a Thrown Bag of Popcorn

What the U.S. Government Has to Do With Your Popcorn Shrimp

Flickr/jeffreyw

It’s day four of the US government shutdown and imported food Americans are eating is passing through with little of the inspection it’s normally given.

Thanks to the shutdown, food safety inspectors at the US Food and Drug Administration, which monitors 80% of the US’s food supply, are on furlough until the budget gets passed, as Food Safety News reports.

That means the FDA isn’t carrying out some of its most critical responsibilities. First is the FDA’s oversight of food imports. The furlough means more than 90% of the foreign seafood Americans eat is coming through unchecked, as well as half the fruit and one-fifth of the vegetables.

One of the big ways the FDA protects consumers is by blocking shipments from companies with a history of tainted foods, monitoring them through what it calls ”red alerts.” These include categories like filthiness (meaning excrement),fruits covered in pesticides, drug-doped seafood, dairy products with melamine, dietary supplements that might have mad cow disease, e. coli-containing seafood and candy laced with lead.

The FDA blocks shipments from tens of thousands such violators. Now, however, there’s no one to stop those foods from finding their way onto American plates.

Take shrimp for example. Americans now eat 4.2 pounds (1.9 kg) a year, way more than any other type of seafood. Some 90% of that is imported, much of it from Thailand, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh:

 

“Exploitative Labor Practices in the Global Shrimp Industry,” Accenture

 

So consistently has shrimp imported from those four countries arrived alreadydecomposed, covered in filth or teeming with salmonella, that FDA flags all shipments as “red alerts” (companies are exempted only after demonstrating health standard compliance).

That means Americans might unknowingly be chowing down on red-alert shrimp. If that were to cause a nationwide outbreak of, say, salmonella, the FDA would normally step in to prevent people from eating more.

Not now. Though the FDA says it will continue to act on “high-risk recalls” (pdf), Caroline Smith DeWaal, the food safety director of a non-profit group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest, doubts that’s sufficient.

“I don’t have confidence that they have the capacity to recognize an emergency and respond to it,” DeWaal told the Christian Science Monitor.

Note that county health authorities are still managing local problems, such as thesalmonella outbreak that’s killed one person in Kentucky so far.

But county officials can’t do much when the outbreak comes from shipped food, as opposed to shoddy hygiene. The food-related outbreaks cross borders too, such as the outbreak of a rare strain of Hepatitis A that sickened 162 people in 10 states across the US throughout the summer. The FDA traced the strain to a Townsend Farms Organic Antioxidant Blend sold at Costco, prompting a recall. After the FDA isolated the culprit, berries imported from Turkey, it placed the responsible company on red alert.

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What the U.S. Government Has to Do With Your Popcorn Shrimp