Man Goes to Jail for Catastrophic Diarrhea

Amazing testimony compares aftermath to both 'spaghetti sauce' and 'chunky peanut butter'
By Ruth Brown,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 29, 2013 3:05 PM CDT
Man Goes to Prison for Catastrophic Diarrhea
   (Shutterstock)

If you have delicate sensibilities, stop reading now. A court has upheld a conviction against a man who spent a week in jail for ... leaving the bathroom of a federal courthouse in Maine covered in poop. The cleaner who found the mess says 75% of the floor was "covered in feces" with more "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," Salon reports. But Ronald Strong, 50, says he didn't mean to leave the bathroom such a, ahem, dump. Strong says his heart medication caused him to poop his pants, so he went into the bathroom to clean up and was so embarrassed, he didn't realize how much of a mess he made in the process.

"I don’t know if you’ve ever spilled spaghetti sauce and there’s meat, you’re trying to get it up as quick as you can," he explained to the court. But the majority of the judges believed the extent of the mess indicated it had to have been deliberate. At least one judge sided with Strong, however, saying the scene did not necessarily sound like deliberate vandalism, citing the cleaner's description of the "smears" as "not necessarily like finger smears but just chunks—chunks and smears, pretty much, kind of like chunky peanut butter." "No rational factfinder could infer willfulness from the consistency of feces," the judge concluded. Click through to Salon to read more of the very graphic testimony or click for another very weird (but not quite so gross) crime.

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