Credit: Dangerous Minds / Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office

I know that ‘Florida Man’ is normally the culprit of inexplicable acts that turn up in the news, and fair play, it’s a reputation that’s richly deserved. However, there must be something in the water down there, because ‘Florida Woman’ is also responsible for their fair share of insane shit.

Now, the truth is that the reason the citizens of the Sunshine State get these kinds of stories written about it isn’t that people are any more weird there than anywhere else. Turns out, a country of 343 million people has its fair share of head cases anywhere you look. The reason that you hear more about what goes on in Florida is that the state has surprisingly lax freedom of information laws, especially when it comes to arrests.

This means that any journalist looking for a sensational scoop can just read the arrest records in small-town Florida over the past couple of months, find someone who’s done something bizarre and laugh all the way to the bank. God only knows what the person who broke this story must have thought when they found the details of how one teacher in St Petersburg, Florida, had treated their students at the Lealman and Asian Family Centre in 2023.

Danielle Harkins taught literacy to a group of teenagers in this school. A small class of around seven kids of Asian descent, she was someone the group trusted, having worked at the school for around four and a half years. However, what they might not have known was that away from this school, Harkins was falling apart. By the time she was arrested, she had recently divorced her husband of three years and was in a pitched custody battle for their two kids.

She was the defendant in a sexual violence injunction that had recently been dismissed. She had also filed a domestic violence injunction against her ex-husband, which was also dismissed. In her despair, according to her friends, she’d become disturbingly obsessed with extreme religious beliefs.

What had this Florida teacher done?

The really tragic thing is that none of the kids who suffered at Harkins’ hands actually came forward about what had happened to an adult. One of them texted a friend about it, who had then told their parents about it. It turns out that Harkins had become completely convinced that the kids in her class were demonically possessed and that there was only one way to make the demons leave their bodies and save their everlasting souls.

Harkins led this class of 15 and 16-year-old kids in cutting their hands open, which would apparently make the demons leave their bodies, before immediately cauterising the wounds to make sure they wouldn’t return. I can’t stress this enough: Harkins was making children who trusted her cut their hands open, then hold a lighter flame to it until the wound shut. In one horrific case, the wind blew the lighter’s flame out while closing one wound. Harkins responded by dousing the child’s hand in perfume and setting it alight, giving them second-degree burns.

Again, the kids trusted Harkins enough that none of them reported Harkins’ behaviour to authorities or even to their parents. When one of their friends did the right thing, though, Harkins was arrested for aggravated battery and child abuse. Rationally, I know that it’s not something specifically wrong with Floridians, but still…

What the hell is wrong with Floridians?!