By which we mean “awww” with a side of “huh?”
SETUP: A 21-year-old college student and Army reservist was walking home from work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late one night in 2009 when four men confronted him. They dragged him into an alley, held a gun to his head, forced him to lie facedown on the pavement, and took his cell phone, wallet, keys, and $16 in cash. But then…
AWWW: …as the muggers were about to leave, one of them ordered the others to stop—and told them to give the young man his belongings back. And the robber apologized. Why the change of heart? While he was going through the wallet, the mugger had seen his victim’s Army ID. He said he would never rob a soldier, and the other muggers thanked their would-be victim for his service and walked away—and one of them even gave him a fist bump. (The soldier’s name was not released; the robbers still had his keys, which he hoped to get back.)
SETUP: A cat named Arthur, owned by Robert and Mavis Bell of Wigan, England, passed away one day in January 2008. The couple’s 18-month-old dog, a Lancashire Heeler named Oscar, whom they described as Arthur’s “best friend.”
AWWW: The day after Arthur died, the Bells woke up to find the deceased cat lying in Oscar’s basket at the dog’s side. The dog had snuck out through the cat door during the night and dug up Arthur from his backyard grave. Oscar had then dragged him back inside and cleaned him up. “Arthur’s coat was gleaming white,” Robert Bell said. “Oscar had obviously licked him clean. It must have taken him nearly all night.” The Bells got Oscar a new friend—a kitten named Limpet—and reburied Arthur in what they said was a much more secure grave.
SETUP: In 1944 British soldiers participating in the invasion of Normandy, France, found a 20-year-old German soldier hiding in a foxhole. Heinrich Steinmeyer, a member of the notorious Nazi combat force Waffen-SS, was sent to a maximum-security POW camp in Perthshire County, Scotland, where only the most dangerous Nazis were imprisoned. At the end of the war, Steinmeyer was released, but decided to stay in Scotland and ended up living in the village of Comrie, not far from the site of the camp, for seven years before returning to Germany.
World’s oldest bank robber: J.L. Rountree, 92. In 2003 he robbed a Texas bank of $2,000.
AWWW: In 2009, 65 years after he was captured by the British, the ex-Nazi notified Comrie officials that he was planning to leave his fortune, about $670,000, to the little Scottish village. He said he wanted the money to be used to assist the town’s elderly residents. “I always wanted to pay something back,” Steinmeyer said. “The people were very kind to us German POWs. They did not treat us as the enemy.” Steinmeyer also left instructions that when he dies, he wants his ashes scattered in the hills around the site of the former Scottish war prison.
SETUP: In March 2009, 55-year-old woman named Montse Ventura boarded the Number 64 bus in Barcelona, Spain. A woman seated across from her looked at her for a few minutes, then leaned forward and told Ventura that she’d better get to a doctor. She needed to be tested for a condition called acromegaly, the woman said, which causes an excess in growth hormone due to a tumor on the pituitary gland. “She wrote something down and said, ‘Have the analysis done as soon as possible,’” Ventura later told a Spanish newspaper, “because if you wait until you feel the need to the consult your doctor, you may already be in a very bad state.’”
AWWW: Ventura showed her doctor the note and asked for the tests that the stranger had recommended. The results came back abnormal…and further testing found a tiny tumor on her pituitary gland. It was successfully removed.
FOLLOW-UP: A media campaign to find the woman Ventura called her “guardian angel” followed, and several months later, a 60-year-old endocrinologist named Maria Gloria Prat finally came forward. She said she had made the bus-seat diagnosis based on the shape of Ventura’s hands. “The hands gave me a lot of clues,” she said. “I wasn’t sure whether to say anything—but I am a very spontaneous person.” The paper said that the two women would meet after the media hype had died down.
Top Web searches of 2008: 1) Britney Spears. 2) World Wrestling Entertainment. 3) Barack Obama.