--Patrick Carl Johnson has been ordered by a judge to keep his hands off what are nearest to his heart: buses. He steals them, as many as 100 in the last two years, police in Houston said. Authorities said Johnson would wear a uniform similar to those worn by bus drivers and then persuade bus company officials to let him drive the vehicles out of their lots, sometimes for jaunts of several hundred miles. Prosecutor Don Calvert said Johnson was careful to wash and refuel them before they were returned or abandoned. Authorities said he never sped, but things got a bit wild on June 11, when police said Johnson led them on an eight-minute chase through narrow, congested streets in Houston as he drove a 1983 Trailways bus worth $195,000. "The officers said, 'This guy can really drive a bus,' " said police Sgt. David J. Klinger. "Even on those narrow streets he didn't hit a thing except one street sign." The sign broke a bus window. "He took all those buses, and the total damages were $200," Klinger marveled. "That's probably a better history of damages than most of their drivers have." In court this week, visiting District Judge Randy Stout gave Johnson 30 days in jail, 300 hours of community service, a $200 fine to pay for the window and 10 years of probation. "Next time you set your foot on a bus, or go around a bus, you can go to prison for 10 years," Stout warned him. Police said Johnson told them that his love for buses stems from the time his mother dated a bus driver, and Johnson, then 11, rode for hours.
He's No Longer in Driver's Seat
Newsmakers
--George Bush is a wealthy man. That's George Bush, the soft-spoken mortgage banker, a bachelor who moved from Denver to Fairfield, Conn., in June and won a $3-million New York state Lotto prize this week. Bush, 47, said there are no blood ties between himself and the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee. In fact, Bush has not decided whom to vote for. "I'm really for the best man," he said. "I'm rather impartial."
--Officials of Putnam County, N.Y., have a public works problem of historic proportions. A statue of Sybil Ludington, a Revolutionary War heroine, keeps foaming at the mouth. The statue of Sybil on a horse, a gift from the Daughters of the American Revolution that overlooks Lake Gleneida in downtown Carmel, has been diagnosed as having a corrosion problem. County Legislator Lynn Greenwood said a foundry has recommended that the statue be decapitated to get at the source of things. But a company in Connecticut says it can correct the problem while keeping the statue intact. Sybil, at age 16 in 1777, rode through the countryside warning the Colonists that the British were burning Danbury, Conn.
