The Great Clown Panic of 2016 has receded, but aftershocks still occur from time to time. For example, this Ohio story of parental creativity gone coulrophobically wrong:
An Ohio man who tried to discipline his 6-year-old daughter by chasing her around in a clown mask has been charged after she ran screaming to a stranger’s apartment — prompting that neighbor to fire a gunshot into the air, police say.
Two men are under arrest.
Most of the article is a short story about clowns and terror in a small scale comedy of errors.
It starts thusly:
The incident occurred just before 10 p.m. Saturday, when 25-year-old Vernon Barrett Jr. donned a clown mask and began chasing his young daughter outside their apartment in Boardman Township, a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio.
It was supposed to be a prank, Barrett later told police, a way to get the child to behave without resorting to spanking. A police report did not specify why he was trying to discipline his daughter that day.
Instead, the frightened child ran to a female stranger’s car nearby, jumped inside and said she was being chased by a clown, police said. That woman later told police that the man wearing the clown mask pulled the child out of her car. Unsure of what was happening, the woman called 911. (“I don’t want to be named,” the witness told The Washington Post on Monday when reached by phone, “but I can tell you it scared the bejeezus out of me.”)
Read on for more.
(thanks to Jesse "Goofy Feet" Walker)
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