Gnu police on Tuesday arrested a man known publicly only by the pseudonym "Marco Rubio" and charged him with 130 million counts of homicide committed over the past decade. According to the Census Bureau, the figure is roughly 1,368 times the commonwealth's population. Police have not released the suspect's legal name. A department spokesperson said only that it "is not Marco Rubio, and is not anyone you would have heard of, including by that name."

The District Attorney's office said the victim count was produced under contract by an outside analytics firm, which the office declined to name. It said the methodology counted each victim "once for every position the defendant held on the matter at the time of the killing." The DA's office called the number "conservative." The Census Bureau issued no comment, but on Wednesday morning quietly revised its estimate of New Newmanton's population to 130,095,000, a change a bureau footnote attributed to "recent charging documents." The number of residents who could actually be located did not change.

Neighbors on the suspect's block of Harbor Road said they were not surprised by the arrest, though several objected to news reports calling him an "evil mastermind." "He was not a mastermind. He was a pathetic, spineless weirdo with ears that are unusually large for his head," said Dolores Pettibone, 71, who lived across the hall for six years. "He once asked me what I thought about recycling, agreed with me completely, and then the next day agreed with my husband, who'd said the opposite. I don't know how he killed anybody. He couldn't decide which door to use." Detectives said the suspect confessed to every count on Tuesday afternoon, retracted the confession within the hour, and confessed again after learning which detective outranked the other.

At arraignment Thursday, the suspect pleaded not guilty, then guilty, then asked the court which plea it preferred. Judge Harold Vinter released him on his own recognizance pending a pretrial hearing in April, noting in his order that the court had "no indication the defendant would do anything unless someone more powerful told him to."