(You see? People were doing this WAY before MMA was ever popular.)
*facepalm*
Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently a former MMA fighter named Harold Finger III (seriously) viciously assaulted a woman before setting himself on fire, nearly taking a six year old child with him in the process. This bizarre story comes to us courtesy of KTUU.com out of Anchorage, Alaska, whose “report” is so shockingly inept that we feel the need to post it verbatim:
A former mixed martial arts fighter set himself on fire on Tuesday night and faces assault charges for striking a woman, according to Anchorage Police.
Police said 28-year-old Harold Finger III lit himself on fire during a disturbance around 8:33 p.m. Tuesday. Officers found him badly burned at an apartment on the 200 block of N. Klevin Street.
According to witnesses, APD said Finger became angry while speaking on the phone with an acquaintance after getting out of jail for one week.
Police allege Finger then punched and kicked a 34-year-old woman in the face and head while wearing leather gloves with hard plastic knuckles. The victim and two other women living at the apartment took refuge in a bedroom with one of the women holding her 6-year-old son.
Finger said he was not going back to jail and took a can of Prestone starting fluid and doused the door frame and his upper body and then grabbed the child. The women were able to free the boy before Finger used a lighter to ignite himself, bursting into flames. One of the women extinguished the flames with a jacket.
Finger was taken to a local hospital for severe burns on his upper torso, face, and head. He faces charges of assault in the first and second degree and reckless endangerment with a no-bail warrant.
Anchorage Police said Finger will be served when he is physically able to be taken into custody.
First off, we haven’t been able to find one scrap of evidence that indicates Mr. Finger was ever any sort of MMA fighter, so why is he listed as such in this report, and in the HEADLINE nonetheless? Secondly, if a man is as unstable as Finger clearly was/is, what does his occupation have to do with the events that took place, especially considering that there is nothing to support the seemingly anonymous claim that he was a fighter of any kind, let alone an MMA fighter? This isn’t a story about a postman laying waste to his co-workers, this is a story of a kook trying to harm innocent lives that will now be used in anti-MMA arguments by the likes of Bob Reilly in the future. We may come under a bit of fire here at CP for our biases, but this story is nothing more than a ridiculous attempt to stir up controversy and deface a sport that had nothing to do with the actual incident being reported.
The frustration with such an obvious witch-hunt is seriously inhibiting my ability to formulate any sort of coherent argument, so I’ll let you do the talking for once, Potato Nation. What kind of bullshit is this?
-J. Jones