Top 10 Stories of 2002 -- The Offbeat

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1) DOE! Deer makes surprise entrance at NIU Northern Illinois University employees coming to work in Williston Hall the morning of May 29 were welcomed by boarded-up windows and bloodstains on the carpet. According to NIU police, a deer crashed through a window of the building shortly after 7:30 a.m. Williston Hall serves as the Office of Admissions and is located on Normal Road across from the Holmes Student Center in DeKalb. Secretary Ginger Allen said only a janitor was in the building when the doe came through a window in the office of Brian Pumilia, assistant director of admissions. Pumilia's office is in the rear of the building. After that, the deer ran through the halls before breaking through another window about four doors down from Pumilia's office. "It was kind of surreal," Pumilia said about first hearing the details of the incident. "I really wasn't upset. There's nothing you can do about it." According to Allen, the deer was scared out of the building by an NIU police officer who had come to investigate. The animal's journey inside the building was contained to the first floor. It's not clear whether the deer survived the incident. No carcass was found afterward. -- Rob Carroll 2) Woman runs ferret sanctuary Even though Cathy Strobach of Kirkland is an empty-nester, she still has a full house. Strobach runs Zoo's Ferret Sanctuary, a not-for-profit organization that provides a "safe haven" for mistreated and unwanted ferrets. She currently has 56 ferrets in cages. "This is a forever home," Strobach said. "The buck stops here. Some of (the ferrets) have had three to five prior homes." One of her closest ferret-loving friends, Sondra Braid, teaches life skills classes to female inmates at the Wackenhut Corrections facility in Lockhart, Texas. Braid's students have been knitting and sewing items such as stockings and slippers that are sold to raise money for Zoo's Ferret Sanctuary. However, not all of the custom-made items are getting sold. Braid, who was struck by lightning in October, has not been able to go out and sell the goods at shows. -- Rob Carroll 3) Skateboarder crashes through Subway window Around 11 p.m. on Sept. 25, a young, unidentified man on a skateboard jumped through a plate-glass window of the Subway restaurant on West Lincoln Highway in DeKalb. The young man, who has not been located by police since, then walked to the counter, grabbed some napkins for his bleeding face and exited the store toward First Street with his skateboard in hand. -- Dan Campana 4) Artistic fruit stolen from downtown An art display installed in downtown DeKalb by the NIU Art Museum turned rotten in July. Twelve acrylic fruit sculptures were attached to various buildings along Lincoln Highway in late June as part of an exhibit called "Cornucopia." According to Pete Olson, a preparator for the NIU Art Museum, the pieces were stolen from their locations. By July 13, seven of the 12 sculptures had been removed from the buildings. Only three of the seven were recovered by the NIU Art Museum. "Some of them are just sort of lying there and some have disappeared completely," Olson said in July. The exhibit was meant to remain intact until October. -- Rob Carroll 5) Genoa man reports missing safe, in which police later find drugs Police aren't sure what Jordan Bass, 18, of Genoa, was thinking when he called to report a safe containing nearly $10,000 missing on Dec. 13. After all, police reportedly found 229 grams of what are believed to be psychedelic mushrooms in the safe. Bass and the man alleged to have taken the safe, Jeremy Fawbush, 21, of Marengo, both were charged and taken to DeKalb County Jail the same day. Their cases are pending. -- Dan Campana 6) Man hides in tree from DeKalb police A man described as "very intoxicated" reportedly stole a car from a State Street home during the early morning hours of Feb. 28, crashed it into a squad car and then fled on foot from police. Police later located the suspect, Adam Swan, hiding in a tree on South Seventh Street. He was then charged with a dozen offenses related to the incident. -- Dan Campana 7) Medieval fight club mixes it up Many fights took place in DeKalb's Hopkins Park this summer, resulting in severed limbs and several deaths. That was because members of Dun Harrow were at the park practicing as part of their involvement in Belegarth, a medieval combat society. Basically, it consisted of about 20 people getting together in a grassy area of the park and having battles with padded weapons. If a fighter gets hit in the arm, the limb must be put behind his or her back. Getting struck in the leg calls for the "victim" to fall to one knee. Two hits to any of the limbs or a shot to the torso results in the death of the fighter. "You have a wide variety of society here," said Dan Frey, ruler of the kingdom. "You have everything from punk kids to business owners. This is a little different way of relieving the stress of everyday life." -- Rob Carroll 8) Car lands in tree after accident A Cortland man was taken to Kishwaukee Community Hospital with minor injuries after a bizarre August traffic accident in DeKalb. Jack Blevins, 76, was heading north in the 2000 block of South Fourth Street in a 1997 Buick. For some unexplained reason, his vehicle drifted off the road and into a culvert. The car flipped onto its roof and came to rest in the middle of some small trees. The owner of the property where the car landed was at her nearby house at the time of the accident. "I just heard the noise and I came out and looked," said the woman, who did not wish to be identified. -- Rob Carroll 9) No cause found in Cavel fire One of only three horse-slaughtering plants in the country mysteriously burned down on Easter Sunday, three months after the company that owned it won a permit to do a major renovation of the facility. No cause has been found for the fire that caused $2 million in damage to the Cavel International plant on Harvestore Drive in DeKalb. In December 2001, the DeKalb City Council granted Cavel a permit to renovate and expand the facility. Cavel sells horse meat for human consumption in Europe. The permit request was met with strong opposition from local residents, as well as many from outside DeKalb, who argued that horse slaughtering was inhumane. To date, Cavel has not rebuilt the plant. -- Chris Rickert 10) Dogg days in DeKalb Snoop Dogg packed Otto's Niteclub for a show on April 10. The rapper didn't step in front of the crowd until almost two hours after the scheduled start time, and finished his set just an hour after it started. But nobody seemed to mind; they just came to see the West Coast rapper in a small club. "He's doing club tours right now," Otto's co-owner Duff Rice said when the show was announced in March. "Just mainly colleges, so it just kind of worked out." -- Rob Carroll