03-18-2005, 07:54 AM
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#68 (permalink)
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Easy Rider
Location: Moscow on the Ohio
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Looks like the suing couple have had some problems.
Quote:
Couple take lumps since cookie suit
Durango - Herb Young turned the telephone off again Tuesday after it rang at 12:40 a.m.
One recent caller had told him that "you should be found dead in a ditch."
Nine out of 10 calls to his house are from "crackpots," he said, ever since a plate of cookies and a case in La Plata County Small Claims Court turned life upside down.
Since his wife, 49-year-old Wanita "Renea" Young, successfully sued two 18-year-old girls for scaring her with a late-night knock on the back door and a then-anonymous cookie drop on the porch, she and Herb have spent the last two weeks trying to defend themselves. A barrage of crank calls and hate mail and truckloads of strange packages have been aimed at their rural home just south of Durango.
Almost everyone but the magistrate has taken the girls' side in the court conflict over about $900, part of the medical bill for Renea Young's anxiety attack. The case made headlines around the world.
"Last week the calls were all day, every day, and all night," Herb Young said. "It's slowing down."
He estimated that one-third of the calls to his home have been from the area, but two-thirds are from all over the country.
Many strangers have made their own cookie deliveries to the Youngs, everything from elaborately wrapped and expensively stocked gift baskets to an envelope holding Oreo crumbs.
Nationally syndicated radio talk-show host Michael Gallagher sent 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies to U.S. troops abroad in honor of the "Colorado Cookie Caper" and the two girls who were sued, Taylor Ostergaard and Lindsey Zilletti.
On Tuesday, the Youngs' rural mail carrier told Herb Young that she had two small truckfuls of packages for him, but they appeared to be empty boxes.
"Send them back," he said he told her. He wasn't sure how to interpret empty boxes.
"Some people have been almost pleasant and said they were just calling 'to voice my opinion,"' he said. "The flip side is that I've heard every profanity you can imagine. And people threatening to cut me up or beat me up or my wife."
One caller told the Youngs that "you are what's wrong with society."
"All this over cookies," Renea Young said.
She is so devastated, she said, that she hasn't been back to her part-time job as a Wal-Mart cashier.
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