The previous evening, after his hearing, Eipp had hidden on a balcony until the Civic Center pretty much cleared out. Then he ducked into room C-10, loaded computer equipment into a recycling bin and wheeled his cargo outside. There, he stuffed it all into a large box that he tucked out of sight. Eipp was lucky enough to get his high-tech haul out of the building, but his stupidity caught up with him.

By the time Civic Center workers discovered their equipment had vanished, Eipp was already in police custody. It seems one heist just wasn’t enough: Shortly after leaving the Civic Center, he’d been caught right down the street trying to steal a Volkswagen. Not that he wouldn’t have been nabbed soon enough for the computer job, since fingerprints and a shoe print, along with video surveillance, made it clear Eipp was the culprit.

Now he faced charges that included attempted auto theft, burglary and grand theft. Last September, he pleaded guilty to them all. Speaking to a reporter, Eipp blamed his thievery in the courthouse on a drug problem, saying he’d stolen the computers because “I needed help and didn’t know how to ask for it.”

In the end, Eipp chose to help himself — to about four years in prison.

Zachereya McGrew had a really embarrassing injury. But far more humiliating was how he got it.

When the 23-year-old discovered that his car speakers were missing, he figured he knew who’d swiped them — a teenager from a nearby Wichita, Kansas, neighborhood. And he’d make the kid pay.

The teen was in his front yard when a white four-door Toyota zoomed up and McGrew jumped out of the backseat. He ordered the youth to get in the car and take him to his speakers, which the terrified boy refused to do. McGrew then reached into his waistband and pulled out a handgun (a stolen weapon, incidentally, which he’d gotten in a trade for his pit bull). At that point, the teen took off at a sprint, and McGrew fired at least two shots at him, missing his mark.

Once the boy was out of sight, McGrew slid the gun back into his waistband. Maybe he fumbled things because his pants had begun to sag, or maybe it was his nervous excitement, but McGrew’s finger squeezed the trigger, firing off a perfect shot — into his own left testicle. That can cause a guy to flinch, which McGrew did, pulling the trigger again and sending another bullet slamming into his left calf.

His two friends, who were in the Toyota, immediately drove him to the hospital, where McGrew shuffled in, crying with pain. Police were quickly summoned, and struggled to make sense of what McGrew told them through his tears. He first tried to save face by telling the officers that he’d been shot in the groin and leg by an unknown Hispanic man. But finally, he confessed that the damage to his privates was self-inflicted.

McGrew was charged with aggravated assault and pleaded guilty. As word spread of his shooting prowess, headline writers had a field day. The best may have been this one from MSNBC’s website: “Nobody move or the one on the right gets it too.”