Surly skinhead makes first court appearance

After a botched attempt to escape from prison last week, Curtis Michael Allgier is accused of shooting and killing a corrections officer, trying to run down a sheriff's deputy with a car, pistol-whipping an Arby's clerk and slashing the throat of a civilian who tried to stop him.
Charged with homicide and a whole bunch of other stuff from the same mess of a crime spree, Allgier made his first court appearance yesterday.
This is from The Salt Lake Tribune:
"Monday's hearing began with the judge saying, 'Good morning. Mr. Allgier?'
'Yo,' replied Allgier.
As the four-minute hearing proceeded, Allgier looked up and appeared to roll his eyes a half-dozen times, and at one point, he seemed to utter a sigh."
The D.A. has said she intends to seek the death penalty.

Missouri inmates more likely born to lose than to win

By Greg Reeves
When it comes to tattoos that spell out a purpose in life, Missouri prison inmates pick "born to lose" nearly seven times more often than "born to win". "Born to raise hell" runs a close second as a tattooed statement of meaning. Here are the "born to" stats of inmate tattoos:

Top tattoos of Missouri prison inmates - Part II

By Greg Reeves
Our post nine days ago about the most popular tattoos of Missouri prison inmates has been bouncing around the blogosphere, even though Crime Scene KC hasn't been advertised to anyone yet.
We've made the Chicago Sun-Times, something called einnews, this blog and our favorite, stumbleupon.com. The post also drew 13 comments. A sample:

• "Cross, rose and heart are 1-2-3... I think that's sweet."
• "What a stupid ass survey.  How is this information important at all?  I guess if I ever went to prison, I would know what all the "popular" tattoos were in order to fit in.  Oh and "bunny"???  BUNNY?  Who the hell did this survey? A woman?"
• "I have a feeling that "BUNNY" means playboy bunny. Its a very popular tattoo among the ladies. Note that they did not specify gender, these are stats from all inmates; male and female."
• "There is an ongoing study in Russia regarding prison tatooing and it's meaning in the criminal underworld. It is much more like Yakuza tattooing in that it specifically identifies the criminal as such. I am guessing this is not the case here in the states? Unless Unicorns are specifically from women's prisons..."
• "Tears = # of tears correlates with number of people tattoo-ee has killed."

This tells us Missouri prison inmate tattoos are a matter of great public interest - or at least curiosity - so we plan to draw more from the 68,430 different tattoos in our Missouri inmate database.

Top tattoos of Missouri prison inmates

By Greg Reeves
The Kansas City home invasion reported today in which one of the robbers had "KC" tattooed on his neck caused us to look up the most popular tattoos of Missouri prison inmates. See our previous post on the robberies.
We happen to have that data from the Missouri Department of Corrections, though it's somewhat old (1997). Later versions of the department's data omitted the tattoo descriptions.

Here are the most popular inmate tattoos: