Rick Ehlert, 44, wanted a memorable cruise on the Holland America MS Ryndam and he certainly got it. The Californian is facing both criminal and civil liability after he reportedly dropped the anchor of the cruise ship and deployed a life bouy.
Police say that Ehlert admitted to being drunk at the time and that he succeeded in carrying out a series of steps to drop the anchor while the ship was in motion. The result was “significant damage to the ship’s rudder or propeller, which could disable the ship’s ability to maneuver, or puncturing of the ship, which could result in sinking or severe flooding.” I guess a snapshot on the bow was not enough as a keepsake.
Ehlert was captured on surveillance tape as he figured out how to drop the anchor.
He has been charged with a felony and will also likely face a civil lawsuit from the company.
Source: CNN
As someone who spends his day investigating goofy doctors, I’m surprised to learn this particular mental midget wasn’t an MD. – it sounds so much like the kinds of cases that pour into my office on a weekly basis, i.e.:
http://www.wftv.com/news/12926707/detail.html
We are, I regret to say, rapidly morphing into the laughing stock of the rest of the decorum-respectful citizens of planet earth, in our never-ending “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” egomaniacal traveling roadshow. The only real surprise here is that this nut with a suitcase didn’t stop to video tape his lunacy.
50 years ago, a book called “The Ugly American” was written. The subject? Nasty U.S. behavior overseas. Every American high schooler should be required to memorize it.
In the meantime, in a parallel universe, Holland Cruise Lines would be legally allowed to drag this seed-for-brains nutcase behind the ship for shark bait. But of course they won’t happen here, so this miscreant will go on to spawn still more of his misfit genes.
As an EMS type for years, I used to wonder if anybody ever noticed the inherent flaw in our tolerating rotten human behavior – as a species? An essential premise in Darwin’s studies was that, “organisms of all species which display unfavorable phenotypes (traits) tend not to survive” over the long-term. But we as prescient humans are the only life-forms to contradict nature, thereby almost ensuring our long-term social demise, by tolerating the mental midgets among us.
As my Iowa farmer Dad used to say, Lord, love a duck.