"He said he did it because he wanted to honor all the golfers who had died"

David Kelly with a bizarro story of 57-year-old Douglas Jones, who probably won't have his job working at a golf course much longer after it was discovered he was depositing golf balls--among other things--in the Joshua Tree National Park...as a tribute to dead golfers:

"He said he did it because he wanted to honor all the golfers who had died," Zarki said. "He left the cans of fruit and vegetables supposedly for the assistance of stranded hikers."

And the park permits and literature?

"He wanted to leave his mark," Zarki said.

Contrary to what rangers originally thought, Jones wasn't chipping golf balls into the desert with a club. He was hurling them from his car.

The balls, numbering between 2,000 and 3,000, were unlikely to pose a threat unless a hapless animal mistook one for an egg and tried to swallow it, Zarki said. But the cleanup was a different story.

"We estimate we spent about 373 staff hours or about $9,000 on this case," he said.