Brickbats: January 2026

A substitute van driver for Pennsylvania’s West Shore School District got lost multiple times while taking kids home because he put the right address but the wrong city into his GPS, and heavy highway traffic then forced him to detour onto back roads. The driver called his supervisor twice to say he was lost, and district staff tried to give him directions over the phone, but after 5 p.m., they finally told him to pull over at a local business; families were then told to go pick up their kids.

Steven Keenan resigned after being suspended as director of facilities services for Akron Public Schools. According to a school board investigation, Keenan traded in 11 of the school district’s lawn mowers to a vendor without authorization, then bought seven of them back at a discounted “friends and family” price for $5,693. He then listed five of those mowers for sale on Facebook Marketplace, asking $14,700 in all.

In Grand Prairie, Texas, police officers mistakenly went to Thomas Simpson’s house while responding to a disturbance call. They say when they knocked on the door, Simpson confronted them with a gun and they shot him in the leg. Simpson says the officers did not announce themselves as police before shooting and he believed he was confronting burglars. Police admitted they were at the wrong house but blamed 911 dispatch for providing the wrong address. Officers also referred Simpson to be prosecuted for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon against a police officer.

In Annobón, an island province of Equatorial Guinea, residents wrote to the government with concerns about a construction company’s use of dynamite, saying the explosions pollute their water and farmlands. The authorities responded by cutting off the island’s internet access.

Chris Bank has fought a four-year legal battle with the city of St. Peters, Missouri, over growing sunflowers in his front yard. City officials first said he broke a rule requiring at least a 50–50 ratio of flowers to grass. Bank disputed the violation, which the city dropped. In 2025, the city changed the ordinance, classifying sunflowers as a crop and limiting them to 10 percent of a front yard. Bank refused to remove his plants, and the case is now headed to trial.

In England, a Thames Valley police officer visited cancer patient Deborah Anderson’s home to demand that she apologize for a social media post or go down to the police station for an interview. The officer presented the ultimatum after someone filed a report saying they found her comments upsetting. Anderson refused, citing her right to speech. The police ultimately dropped the investigation after pushback, but they have repeatedly declined to provide details on the offending comment.

Trevor Walker, a sheriff’s deputy in New Mexico, faces charges of embezzlement and fraud after investigators discovered he deposited checks meant for his former employer into his personal account. When Walker joined the Aztec Police Department in September 2022, he received nearly $17,000 as a retention bonus that required him to stay for a full year, but he left a month early in August 2023 and joined the Rio Arriba County Sheriff’s Office in October. The city of Aztec sued, and a judge ordered his wages garnished from his new salary to repay the bonus. Due to a clerical error, seven checks totaling nearly $5,300 went to Walker’s home instead of Aztec. He signed and cashed the checks despite not being a payee.

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