Florida Man Robs Banks in Elderly Disguise, Titles His Memoir After God

David Sartin Jr., 40, of St. Petersburg, has allegedly solved the eternal bank-robbery dilemma of “how do I not get recognized” by becoming, convincingly, an old man. Twice. Federal prosecutors say Sartin robbed a Largo bank in August and a St. Petersburg bank in September wearing a prosthetic elderly-gentleman mask, politely instructing tellers to skip the dye packs, because even a career criminal has standards.

After the first job, he reportedly swapped his getaway car for a bicycle, pedaled to the bank, robbed it, pedaled back to the car, and drove off — a disguise-and-transportation strategy best described as community theater. Before robbery number two, he spray-painted the white roof of his getaway vehicle black, apparently on the theory that law enforcement, unlike toddlers, cannot recognize a car by its shape.

Agents searching a property connected to Sartin found a second old-man mask, a fake handgun, black-paint-stained gloves, and — the detail that elevates this from crime blotter to scripture — a journal dated 2021 and titled “God’s Best friend is a Bank Robber! Uncle Henry Cops and Robbers the world through the eyes of a Bank Robber.” We do not know what it means either. Sartin was already on supervised release for five Texas bank robberies committed in 2016, which he also allegedly pulled off in a similar mask, suggesting a man who found his bit decades ago and simply refuses to retire it.

He now faces two counts of bank robbery, each carrying up to 20 years, which means the only thing in this story with a longer runtime than his potential sentence is the journal’s prose style.

We did not make this up. The U.S. Department of Justice has the receipts, and they are notarized.

Federal Judge Says Actually, Banning Books You Haven’t Read Might Still Be Unconstitutional

A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit challenging Utah’s school book ban law can proceed, rejecting the state’s attempt to get the case tossed out before authors and publishers even got their day in court. It is, refreshingly, a ruling that treats “the First Amendment might still apply here” as a live legal question rather than an inconvenience.

Utah’s law allows a book to be pulled from every school district statewide if enough local districts flag it, a system that in practice has led to sweeping removals of titles based on complaints that, in more than a few cases, appear to have been filed by people who never finished reading them. The lawsuit, brought in part on behalf of authors whose work has been swept up in the process, argues this amounts to unconstitutional viewpoint-based censorship.

The judge’s decision to let the case continue doesn’t declare the law unconstitutional outright, but it does mean the state will actually have to defend it on the merits, in front of a court, with evidence, rather than getting to make the inconvenient lawsuit disappear on a technicality.

It’s a small, procedural, unglamorous kind of victory. It is also, in the current climate, the kind of victory we’ll gladly take: a judge deciding that due process still applies, even to a Kurt Vonnegut paperback.

Don’t take our word for it: The Salt Lake Tribune has the full story. It’s exactly as described.

Connecticut Court Reminds Everyone That ‘I Don’t Feel Like It’ Is Not a Religion

A Connecticut judge has upheld the state’s law eliminating religious exemptions for school vaccine requirements, closing out a four-year legal battle in which families argued that being required to vaccinate their kids before sending them into a room with two dozen other children violated their religious liberty. The court, apparently familiar with how diseases work, disagreed.

The ruling dismisses the final claims in a case that has dragged on since the exemption was first repealed, and it affirms what public health officials have been saying the whole time: a personal aversion to shots does not automatically qualify as a sincerely held religious belief, no matter how firmly it is asserted at a school board meeting.

This is, we should note, exactly the kind of story we love to feature here: a moment when sanity narrowly held the line against a tide of vibes-based legal reasoning. Nobody’s faith is being outlawed. Nobody’s church is being shut down. What’s being outlawed is the idea that “I read something on social media” constitutes a valid basis for skipping the MMR shot.

Connecticut families opposed to the law can, of course, appeal, homeschool, or simply continue being upset on the internet. What they can no longer do is claim a religious carve-out that was never really about religion in the first place.

We did not make this up. The Connecticut Mirror has the receipts.

Man Climbs Massive L.A. Billboard to Personally Correct Jesus’s Theology

A billboard towering over Los Angeles carried a message some viewers considered theologically incorrect: a denial of Christ’s divinity. Rather than write a strongly worded letter, start a petition, or simply keep driving, one man decided the appropriate response was to climb the structure and paint over it himself, correcting the record to read “Jesus Is God” in what has since become a viral video.

The footage shows the man scaling the massive sign with the confidence of someone who has fully outsourced his risk assessment to a higher power. Whatever safety concerns might apply to freehand climbing a roadside billboard several stories above a Los Angeles freeway were, evidently, secondary to the theological emergency at hand.

Reactions online have split along predictable lines: some are calling it a bold act of faith, others are calling it vandalism, and a smaller but vocal contingent is simply asking how nobody stopped a man from climbing a highway billboard in broad daylight. All three groups have a point.

No word yet on whether the billboard’s original owners plan to press charges, repaint the message back, or just leave it, since at this point the sign has generated more attention corrected than it ever did as originally intended.

All of this actually happened. Faithwire confirmed it.

U.S. Commander Reportedly Informs Troops That Jesus Personally Anointed Trump to Go to War With Iran

Somewhere between the strategy briefings and the supply chain logistics, a U.S. military commander reportedly took a moment to inform troops that President Trump had been anointed by Jesus Christ himself to wage war on Iran. We assume this was delivered with the same tone of matter-of-fact authority usually reserved for weather updates and mess hall hours.

According to reporting on the matter, this framing wasn’t an isolated pep talk but part of a broader pattern of military leadership describing potential conflict with Iran in explicitly religious, even apocalyptic, terms. Watchdog groups have raised concerns about troops being told a war is part of “God’s divine plan,” which is one way to boost morale, we suppose, if your morale runs on End Times energy.

There is, as far as we’re aware, no official process by which Jesus anoints a sitting U.S. president for a specific military campaign. No paperwork, no burning bush press release, no verified account. Just, apparently, a commander’s word, passed down the chain like any other order.

The separation of church and state remains, at least on paper, a foundational American principle. The separation of church and military briefing room appears to be a work in progress.

Don’t take our word for it: Democracy Now! has the full story. It’s exactly as described.

Virgin Mary Allegedly Spotted in Rwanda, Church Launches the Paperwork

A group of children in northern Rwanda say they witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary, and within days the sighting had drawn thousands of pilgrims to the area, all hoping for a glimpse of something that, by definition, only a handful of kids actually saw. The Catholic Church, ever cautious about these things, has launched a formal investigation, because you cannot just let a miracle go unaudited.

Rwanda is no stranger to this territory. The country is already home to Our Lady of Kibeho, one of the few Marian apparitions the Vatican has ever officially blessed, so there is a certain institutional muscle memory here for how to handle a crowd of the faithful showing up somewhere on short notice.

Church authorities have urged caution, which is the polite, robed way of saying “let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Investigations into these things tend to take years, involve theologians, psychologists, and occasionally chemists, and often conclude with a shrug that neither confirms nor fully denies anything, which is itself a kind of miracle of institutional patience.

In the meantime, the crowds keep coming, the vendors keep selling water and rosaries, and the children at the center of it all get to carry the rather significant weight of maybe having seen the Mother of God, or maybe just really vivid weather.

We did not make this up. KT Press has the receipts.

Florida Man’s Big Chipotle Date Turns Out to Be a Police Sting, Shockingly

A 52-year-old man showed up to a Delray Beach Chipotle expecting a romantic rendezvous he’d arranged online. What he got instead was a set of handcuffs, a felony arrest, and the mild indignity of getting caught on a livestream watched by strangers on the internet, because in 2026 even your worst life decisions come with an audience.

The sting was set up as part of an ongoing predator-catching operation, the kind increasingly popular with online creators who have realized that “showing up to confront a guy at a fast-casual burrito chain” makes for compelling content. Delray Beach police say the man believed he was meeting a minor, drove to the location anyway, and discovered too late that his lunch order came with a side of consequences.

Police say this wasn’t an isolated arrest either; the livestreamed sting operation has apparently produced multiple similar encounters, suggesting that a shocking number of people think a burrito bowl is an appropriate venue for the worst decision of their life.

Charges reportedly include traveling to meet a minor and using a two-way communication device to commit a felony, which is a lot of legal terminology for what boils down to: he really, really wanted that burrito.

All of this actually happened. CBS12 confirmed it.

76-Year-Old Florida Man Just Wanted to Drive Drunk on Rum and Cocaine, Is That So Much to Ask

There is a certain kind of honesty that only comes from a man who has clearly stopped caring what anyone thinks of him. A 76-year-old Florida man, already driving on a suspended license, allegedly told deputies exactly what he’d been doing before they pulled him over: drinking rum and snorting cocaine, in what we can only assume was some kind of retirement bucket-list combo deal.

Deputies reportedly didn’t have to work very hard for this confession. The man apparently just volunteered it, the way most of us might mention we grabbed a coffee on the way to work. Florida law enforcement has long benefited from residents who treat their Miranda rights as more of a suggestion than a right.

This was, notably, not the man’s first rodeo with impaired driving, which raises the obvious question of why his license was suspended in the first place and how that suspension was going to stop a man who was, by his own account, committed to the bit. Spoiler: it did not stop him. It rarely does.

He now faces new charges on top of the old ones, presumably to be handled by a judge who has heard some version of this story before, possibly from this same man.

Don’t take our word for it: Fox News has the full story. It’s exactly as described.

Florida Man Skips the Neighborly Chat, Goes Straight to Hiring a Hitman Over a Drone

Most people, when a neighbor’s drone buzzes their backyard one too many times, do something reasonable: complain to the HOA, put up a “No Drones” sign, maybe key the guy’s mailbox out of spite. A Florida man decided the appropriate response to a drone dispute was to allegedly offer a jail inmate $5,000 to kill the neighbor entirely, thereby solving the drone problem and also becoming a felon in one tidy transaction.

According to authorities, the plan came together the way most Florida murder-for-hire plots do: badly, and with a paper trail. The man is accused of reaching out to someone behind bars to arrange the hit, apparently unaware that inmates are not generally known for their discretion, or their access to functioning hitmen, or their interest in doing favors for free.

Investigators say the arrangement fell apart before anyone was hurt, which is good news for the neighbor, who presumably still has no idea his airspace violations nearly got him killed. It is less good news for the accused, who now faces charges considerably more serious than “annoying” or “should really read up on easement law.”

We would like to point out, gently, that Florida already has a legal process for drone disputes. It’s called a phone call to the sheriff’s non-emergency line. It does not, as far as we know, require a bail bondsman afterward.

We did not make this up. WKNO has the receipts.

Pennsylvania Senator Says God Told Him Not to Run for Governor, Also Couldn’t Be Bothered to Endorse Anyone Who Is

Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano, who lost the 2022 governor’s race in a landslide, announced via Facebook livestream with his wife that he would not be running again in 2026. The reason, he explained, was divine: “God has not called us to run for governor this year.” The couple say they prayed extensively before arriving at that conclusion, which took considerably longer to announce than to reach, given that Mastriano spent much of the livestream reminiscing about 2022 and revisiting his COVID-19 grievances before actually confirming he was out.

Mastriano also declined to endorse Stacy Garrity, the Republican candidate who is running, saying only “we’ll talk about that down the road” — a curious position for a man who just told his followers he’s in direct communication with God about who should and shouldn’t hold statewide office.

He’ll remain in the state senate, where his current term runs through 2028 and he’s not up for reelection this cycle, which conveniently means no one had to hear from God about that particular decision.

Don’t take our word for it: PhillyVoice has the full story. It’s exactly as described.