List of Unusual Deaths

A List of Unusual Deaths

620 BC
-Draco, the Athenian lawmaker, died when he was accidentally suffocated under the weight of carpets, hats and furs that were thrown upon him by the appreciative citizens of Aegina as gifts during his visit to their theatre.

210 BC
-Qin Shi Huang, the Emperor of China, died after ingesting several pills made out of mercury, which he believed would grant him eternal life.

162 BC
-Eleazar Avaran, a soldier in the Maccabean Revolt, charged a war-elephant that he believed carried the opposing army’s king, Antiochus V, and stabbed it in the gut from beneath. The elephant collapsed and died, crushing him to death in the process.

892
-Sigurd Eysteinsson, also known as Sigurd the Mighty, the second Viking Earl of Orkney, died of a fatal gangrenous infection. After defeating his sworn enemy Mael Brigte, he decapitated him and strapped his severed head to the side of his horse. While riding, the head’s jaw collided against the horse’s side, causing it to bite-down on Eystenisson’s unprotected leg. The bite-wound rapidly became infected and ultimately killed him.

1387
January
-Charles II of Navare, also known as Charles the Bad, the king of Navare and key participant in the Hundred Years War, burned alive when the brandy-soaked bandages he had been covered in to cure an illness were accidentally ignited by one of his servant’s candles.

1518
July
-An unknown number of citizens of Strasbourg, Alsace, died of heart-failure, heat-stroke and exhaustion in a fit of dancing that lasted nearly a month. An escalating number of people, primarily women, began spontaneously dancing in the streets of Strasbourg, which ultimately included more than 400 people dancing simultaneously. The participants were said to give no explanation as to why they were dancing other than they felt compelled. Several dozen participants voluntarily continued dancing until they died. The psychological, sociological or medical cause for this event is still unknown. It has since become known as the Dancing Plague of 1518.

1567
-Hans Steininger, the burgomaster of Brunau, Austria, died when he tripped on his own 4.5 ft. long beard, causing him to break his neck.

1794
December
-John Kendrick, an American sea captain and explorer famous for his participation in the Colombia Expedition, was killed along with several other sailors when a fellow trading ship accidentally used a loaded cannon when firing a salute to his vessel.

1814
October
-Several large vats ruptured at the Meux & Company Brewery in London, England, in a chain reaction, causing more than 320,000 imperial gallons of beer to flood the nearby city streets. Two homes were destroyed and eight people were killed in what has since been called “The London Beer Flood”.

1830
September
-William Huskisson, a British statesman and financier, became the first person in history to die in a railway accident. While attending the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Huskisson was struck by an oncoming train while attempting to enter the carriage of the Duke of Wellington to shake hands. Huskisson died several hours later.

1845
March
-Clara Webster, and English ballet star, accidentally set her costume on fire while dancing too close to an open gas-lamp during a live performance of Revolt of the Harem. She died of burn-trauma two days later.

1871
June
-Clement Vallandigham, Ohio politician and lawyer defending a man on a charge of murder, accidentally shot himself demonstrating how the victim might have accidentally shot himself while in the process of drawing a weapon when standing from a kneeling position. He later died from this injury. The defendant, Thomas McGehan, was ultimately cleared of all charges.

1880
May
-Sunandha Kumariratana, the Queen of Thailand, along with her daughter, drowned when their royal ship capsized because her servants were forbidden under threat of death to touch her.

1912
February
-Franz Reichelt, an Austrian tailor and inventor living in Paris, died jumping from the first platform of the Eifel Tower in a test of his experimental parachute-suit. Reichelt had designed the flight-suit that extended into a parachute as a way to save pilots that were forced to eject from their aircraft midflight when they couldn’t carry a traditional backpack-parachute with them. He had received permission from the Paris Police to conduct a trial-run of his suit on the Eifel Tower using a dummy. Just before the test was to take place, Reichelt revealed that he would be making the jump instead, despite attempts by friends and spectators to dissuade him. When he made the jump his parachute failed to deploy and he fell 190 ft. to his death. The entire event, including Reichelt’s death, was captured by a cinematographer and can be found on the Internet.

1919
January
-Unseasonably warm temperatures caused a 50 ft. tall and 90 ft. diameter tank of molasses being processed at the Purity Distilling Company in Boston to rupture, spilling 2,300,000 gallons of raw molasses into the city streets. The resulting 25 ft. tall wave was estimated to have been travelling upwards of 35 mph. It killed 21 people and injured 150 more in what has come to be known as “The Boston Molasses Flood”.

1920
August
-Ray Chapman, the 29-year-old shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, died 12 hours after being struck in the head by a pitch thrown by Yankees pitcher Carl Mays. He is the first and only Major League Baseball player to have died due to an injury sustained during a game.

September
-Dan Andersson, a Swedish author and composer, died in a hotel room after the staff used hydrogen cyanide against a bedbug infestation and failed to clear his room of the residual poison before letting him rent it.

1923
June
-Frank Hayes, a 35-year-old horse jockey, suffered a fatal heart-attack in the middle of a steeplechase at Belmont Park in New York. His body remained on the horse throughout the race and actually came in first. It was only while congratulating Hayes on what was his first (and only) horse-racing victory was it realized that he was dead.

1926
April
-Bobby Leach, a professional stuntman known for being the second person in history to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, died from complications due to having his leg amputated. Leach injured his leg after slipping on an orange peel, with the injury rapidly becoming gangrenous and requiring an ultimately fatal amputation.

1927
-John “Chuck” O’Conner, vaudeville performer and father of actor Donald O’Conner, died onstage during a live performance when he suffered a heart-attack during a family dancing routine.

September
-Isadora Duncan, wife of Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, died due to a broken neck when the long scarf she was wearing became entangled in rear wheel of the car she was riding as a passenger in.

1932
March
-Eben Byers, a golfer and industrialist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, died of the age of 51 due to multiple types of cancer that were contracted through heavy consumption of a radioactive tonic called “Radithor”. Byers believed it was helping him recover from an arm-injury, and he drank nearly 1,400 bottles of the substance, which was primarily composed of dissolved radium, over the course of three years. He was buried in a lead-lined coffin.

1944
November
-Thomas Midgley, Jr., a mechanical engineer and chemist that was physically disabled by Polio, died at the age of 55 when he accidentally strangled himself to death on the cable and pulley system he had built to make it easier for nurses to get him in and out of bed.

1945
September
-Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., a scientist working on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, became the first person in history to die in a nuclear criticality event. While preparing a bomb for the Operation Crossroads series of nuclear tests, Daghlian accidentally dropped a tungsten-carbide brick onto a plutonium-gallium alloy bomb-core, causing it to go supercritical. Daghlian received an estimated 510 REM of neutron radiation and quickly developed severe radiation poisoning. He died in a coma 25 days after the initial incident.

1946
May
-Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist working on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, became the second person in history to die in a nuclear criticality event, eight months after Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. became the first. Slotin was performing an experiment which attempted to begin the first stages of a nuclear reaction by enclosing a plutonium-gallium alloy bomb-core in a beryllium sphere. Slotin, who was not following proper safety protocol at the time, dropped the sphere and caused a “prompt critical” reaction that exposed him to a lethal dose of ionizing radiation. He died nine days later after suffering what doctors described as an “agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas”. The bomb-core that had been used during the accident was actually the same core that had killed Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. eight months prior, which was consequently nicknamed “The Demon Core” by the rest of the staff.

1947
March
-The Collyer Brothers, Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Wakeman Collyer, two siblings known for obsessive hoarding and paranoia-driven protection of their hoarded collections, died in their Harlem apartment when Langley accidentally activated one of the booby-traps he had set to catch intruders. While crawling through a small tunnel made out of newspapers and broken furniture to bring food to his brother Homer (who was blind and fully paralyzed), Langley activated a tripwire which caused several of the floor-to-ceiling stacks of newspapers and phonebooks to collapse on him, crushing him to death. Homer died 12 days later due to starvation. It took police two weeks of clean-up before they finally discovered the location of Langley’s body within the apartment.

1951
-Edward Harrison was playing a round of golf at Inglewood in Kenmore, Washington, when the shaft of his driver broke mid-swing and pierced his groin. He staggered 100 yards before collapsing and bleeding to death.

1953
-Thomas L. McGraw, a photographer recording footage of planes returning to an aircraft carrier after a practice bombing-run, was killed when a 250 lb. bomb that had failed to dethatch from a F4U Corsair became dislodged from the plane upon landing and detonated on the runway. McGraw’s footage survived the incident and was archived, eventually being made available on the Internet.

1958
November
-Gareth Jones, a 33-year-old British actor, died of a heart-attack in between scenes of the play Underground in which he was performing for a live-broadcast on television for the program Armchair Theater. The director was able to successfully improvise around Jones’ absence. The character that Jones was playing was actually supposed to collapse and die of a heart-attack later in the play.

1960
October
-Inejiro Asanuma, head of the Japanese Socialist Party, was assassinated onstage during a live televised rally for the upcoming Lower-House Elections. 17-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi stormed the stage and fatally stabbed Asanuma before he could be subdued by security.

1961
January
-During maintenance of the SL-1 experimental nuclear reactor in Idaho, a control rod was withdrawn too quickly, causing the reactor to undergo a “prompt critical” reaction. The sudden power-surge instantaneously vaporized a large amount of coolant-water, creating a pressure-wave that caused the entire 26,000 lb. vessel to jump 9 feet into the air and a water-hammer event that launched debris and steam into the surrounding area. Army Specialists John A. Byrnes, age 27, and Richard Leroy McKinley, age 22, were killed by the resulting spray of scalding, radioactive steam. Navy Construction Electrician Richard C. Legg, age 26, who was standing on top of the vessel at the time, was impaled through the groin and out of the shoulder by one of the shield-plugs, with his body left pinned to the ceiling. This event resulted in the design of future nuclear reactors being greatly altered for improved safety.

March
-Valentin Bondarenko, a 24-year-old Soviet fighter pilot and cosmonaut trainee, died after suffering third-degree burns caused when the pure oxygen environment of his pressurized training-chamber ignited in a flash-fire.

1964
January
-Four convicts and a truck driver died in a freak roadside accident in Prattville, Alabama. The driver of a produce truck lost control of his vehicle on a road where a prison work gang was performing road-repairs and drove through a large container of liquefied molten tar. Four convicts were killed when they were sprayed by the explosively scattering hot tar. The driver’s truck ultimately crashed and ignited with him inside of it, where he ultimately burned to death.

1967
-Cameraman Rafael John Esposito and actress Brenda Lee Meinsenheimer were killed during the filming of a Pontiac care commercial when a camera-boom suspended from an oncoming car crashed-through the windshield of the car they were driving.

January
-NASA astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chafee died in a flash-fire during a training exercise for the upcoming Apollo 1 launch when the pure oxygen environment of the test-chamber caught fire.

April
-Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, age 40, became the first man in history to die during a space mission during the conclusion of the Soyuz 1 spaceflight. The parachute of his capsule failed to open upon reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

1969
-A stuntman was mauled to death by a shark during the filming of the Samuel Fuller action-movie Shark!, which was at the time supposed to have been sedated. The production-company attempted to promote the film using this fact, including it on revised editions of the movie’s poster.

May
-Second Unit Director John Jordan died during the making of the movie Catch-22 when he fell 4,000 ft. out of the tail-turret of an airplane while filming a bombing scene. Jordan had refused to wear a safety harness due to it interfering with the filming.

1971
June
-Soviet Cosmonauts Gregory Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Victor Patsayev died when their chamber depressurized in space while preparing for reentry during the Syouz-11 spaceflight. They are the first and only deaths in history to have occurred outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.

-J.I. Rodale, author and organic farming advocate, died at the age of 72 during a taping of The Dick Cavett Show while onstage during an interview. Rodale suffered a heart-attack while another guest was being interviewed, and after he stopped moving Dick Cavett asked him “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?”, believing he had fallen asleep. When he continually failed to respond, two physicians from the audience rushed to the stage and attempted to revive him with CPR, which was ultimately unsuccessful. Just prior to sudden fatal heart-attack, Rodale had made remarks during his interview including “I’ve decided to live to be 100” and “I’ve never felt better in my life!”. The episode was never aired.

1972
May
-Leslie Harvey, guitarist for the Scottish blues-rock band Stone the Crows, died onstage during a live outdoor concert at the age of 27 when rainwater collected on stage and caused a non-grounded microphone to become electrified, killing him instantly when he touched it.

1974
February
-Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health-food advocate from Croydon, England, died after consuming ten gallons of carrot juice in ten days, causing him to overdose on Vitamin A and suffer rapid, severe liver damage.

July
-Christine Chubbuck, a news reporter working for WXLT-TV in Florida, committed suicide during a live television broadcast. On the morning of July 15, 1974, Chubbuck concluded a usual summary of the top news-stories of the day and turned to the camera to say “In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in 'blood and guts', and in living color, you are going to see another first - attempted suicide”, before withdrawing a revolver and shooting herself behind her right ear. Chubbuck violently collapsed onto her desk, with the technical-director on set immediately fading the broadcast to black and having the channel broadcast a PSA and then a movie to fill the void in the schedule. The station was hit with a wave of phone-calls from viewers asking if what they had seen had been an elaborate prank. Suffering from extended bouts of clinical depression, Chubbuck had apparently planned to commit suicide during a live broadcast well in advance, as the sheets she had been reading from for her broadcast turned out to contain an account of her suicide she had written in advance in the form of a news-report. Footage of the incident has been withheld by WXLT-TV and no copy of the incident was known to have been recorded by any viewers of the live broadcast.

1975
March
-Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King’s Lynn, England, died in a fit of laughter that lasted 25 minutes. Mitchell and his widow were watching the comedy sketch program The Goodies, which was said to be Mitchell’s favorite television show. A sketch featuring a Scotsman in a kilt using a set of bagpipes to defend himself from a monster made out of black pudding sent Mitchell into a particularly intense laughing-fit which caused him to die of sudden heart-failure while still laughing.

1977
March
-Welsh Formula 1 driver Tom Pryce and Safety Marshall Frederik Jansen van Vuuren were both killed during a practice-run at the Kyalami Racetrack for the 1977 Brazilian Grand Prix. Being run in wet, rainy conditions, a collision resulted in one of the cars igniting. Van Vuuren made his way across the track with a fire-extinguisher to aid the other driver when he was struck by Pryce, who was traveling at 170 mph. The fire-extinguisher Van Vuuren was carrying flew through Pryce’s windshield and struck him in the head. Both impacts killed each man instantly.

1978
January
-Kurt Gödel, an Austrian-American logician and mathematician, died of starvation when his wife, Adele, was hospitalized for six months. Gödel suffered from bouts of mental instability and had obsessive paranoia over being poisoned, refusing to eat any food that hadn’t been prepared by his wife.

September
-Janet Parker, a 40-year-old medical photographer working at the University of Birmingham Medical School, died after contracting Small Pox when the dark-room she was using was accidentally contaminated by the virology lab on the floor beneath it. This was a year after Small Pox had been eradicated in the wild, making Parker the last fatality due to Small Pox in history.

1979
January
-Robert Williams, a worker at the Ford Motor Company Factory in Michigan, is said to be the first man in history to be killed by a robot. A robotic arm designed to pick up and remove stray parts from a work-area began functioning slower than normally intended, and Williams entered the area to speed up the process by picking up the parts himself. The robotic arm descended unexpectedly and struck him in the head, killing him instantly.

August
-Mary A. Koch, a 28-year-old mother of two and typist for the State Transportation Commission in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died at her desk after sniffing a bouquet of eight roses sent to her by her husband to commemorate their eighth wedding anniversary. After smelling the flowers, she collapsed at her desk and was unable to be revived by paramedics. The cause of death was believed to be “an extreme allergic-reaction”.

1980
July
-Troy Leon Gregg escaped from the Georgia State Prison’s death row only to be beaten to death in a bar-fight later that night.

1981
January
-Jeff Daniels, a 19-year-old from Virginia, is said to be the first person in history to die while playing video games. Daniels made it onto the top ten high scores list on an arcade cabinet for the game Berzerk with a score of 16,660 points and then suddenly died of a heart-attack.

May
-Boris Sagal, a Ukrainian-American film director, died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III in Portland, Oregon, when he accidentally walked into the tail rotor-blade of a helicopter and was partially decapitated.

July
-Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old maintenance engineer working in the Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant in Japan, is often reported to be the first person in history to be killed by a robot, though he is actually predated by Robert Williams who died two years prior. Urada was running maintenance on a factory robot but had failed to shut it off completely. It activated unexpectedly and the movement of its hydraulic arm shoved Urada into a nearby grinding-machine.

December
-Carl McCunn, a wildlife photographer, paid a bush pilot to drop him off in the Alaskan wilderness 225 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, where he intended to photograph wildlife for the next 5 months. However, he had failed to make arrangements with the pilot to come and pick him up in August before being dropped off. McCunn eventually ran out of supplies and survived until December of that year when he ultimately shot himself in the head, leaving instructions for whoever found his body to develop his film and return his belongings to his family.

1982
April
-Peter Burkowski, a student from Calumet City, Illinois, died at the Friar Tuck’s Game Room arcade of a sudden heart-attack after getting one of the top ten high scores on an arcade cabinet of the game Berzerk twice in a row. Burkowski’s death is strikingly similar to that of Jeff Daniels who had died a little over a year prior, as both died of a heart-attack, both died after achieving high scores on an arcade cabinet, and both died during or immediately after playing Berzerk. These events have entered gaming folklore and become something known as “The Berzerk Curse”, or “The Curse of Evil Otto”, named after an enemy in Berzerk named “Evil Otto” that tends to be very challenging and shows up at the end of levels.

July
-Actor Vic Morrow and two child-actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, died on the set of the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie when the Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter being used to film the climax of the movie’s first segment destabilized and crashed. The scene was filmed at night and required Morrow to carry the two child-actors through a river while the helicopter pursued at an altitude of about 25 ft. overhead. Director John Landis instructed the pilot to take the vehicle even lower during one of the takes. A pyrotechnic went off while the helicopter’s tail-rotor was still overtop of it, causing it to detach and send the vehicle into an uncontrolled spin. Morrow and Le were decapitated by the top-blades while Chen was crushed to death by one of the skids. All six crew members in the helicopter were injured but survived. This accident led to a lengthy civil and criminal court case that lasted nearly a decade, and marked the first time in the history of Hollywood that a director has been criminally charged due to a fatality on set. The event also led to revisions in the safety-practices that movie studios used for filming.

August
-Navy Lieutenant George M. Prior, 30, died while playing golf at a course in Arlington, Virginia, due to a sudden, extreme allergic reaction to Draconil, a fungicide used to maintain the green on golf courses. Prior had a habit of carrying his tee in his teeth in between shots, which caused him to unknowingly ingest a small amount of the chemical.

October
-Mark Wagstaff, the 30-year-old owner of a security equipment company in Oklahoma City, died during a demonstration of his company’s products for a businessman’s club. Mistakenly convinced that the bullet-proof vest he was wearing was impervious to penetration by a knife-attack, Wagstaff instructed one of his employees to stab him to stab him in the chest with a 2.5 inch knife. He bled to death before paramedics could arrive.

1983
September
-Jimmy Lee Gray, a 34-year-old convicted rapist and child-murderer, killed himself by bashing the back of his head against the metal support-pole behind his chair in the gas chamber he was to be executed in. The toxic gasses released into the chamber had for some reason failed to kill him.

November
-Trulls Helevik, a 31-year-old Norwegian diver serving on the oil rig Byford Dolphin, died in a decompression accident upon resurfacing from underwater in a diving bell. The chamber-lock was released prematurely which caused his environment inside the bell to go from nine atmospheres of pressure to one in a fraction of a second, causing the gasses and blood in his internal organs to undergo sudden rapid expansion. Helevik’s body violently exploded with his remains being blown-through a 24 inch diameter hole at the top of the diving bell, rocketing 30 feet into the air and raining blood, organs and bone-fragments over the oil rig. Three other divers and four technicians were also killed in the event.

-James Ferrozzo, a 40-year-old assistant-manager at the Condor Club in San Francisco, California, died while having sex with one of the club’s strippers, Teresa Hill, on top of a stage piano. The piano was rigged to be raised or lowered on and off the stage via support-cables from the 12 ft. high ceiling. Ferrozzo accidentally activated the lever that caused the piano to be raised back up to the ceiling with the two of them still on top of it. Ferrozzo was crushed to death when the piano reached the ceiling, but Hill survived due to his body absorbing the compression. She remained pinned there beneath Ferrozzo’s corpse for several hours before being discovered and rescued.

1984
March
-Jeffery Doucet, a 25-year-old karate-instructor from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was murdered during a live television news broadcast. Doucet was returning from California to Louisiana Metropolitan Airport while being escorted by police. Ten days prior, Doucet had fled to California after kidnapping 11-year-old Jodie Plauche, whom he was sexually abusing, and after being arrested was now being returned to stand trial. The news station WBRZ was covering his arrival with a live news broadcast. While recording Doucet being escorted by police, Gary Plauche, Jodie’s father, emerged from a hub of payphones and shot Doucet at point-blank range in the side of the head with a .38 caliber revolver. Plauche dropped his weapon before surrendering to police. The entire event was broadcast live and the footage has since been made available on the Internet. Doucet died while on life-support the next day. Gary Plauche pleaded no contest to first-degree murder charges, but despite a confession, footage of the event and a dozen witnesses (and countless more that saw the event on TV), he was sentenced to only 5 years probation.

August
-37 people died in the area surrounding Lake Monoun in West Province, Cameroon, when the lake underwent a limnic eruption. Mass amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide created by the lake’s volcanic lining emerged suddenly as a gas-could once the water became oversaturated, which killed all oxygen-dependant life it came in contact with in seconds. This was the first time a naturally-occurring limnic eruption has been identified.

October
-Jon-Erik Hexum, a 26-year-old actor, died during the production of an episode of the television series Cover Up when he shot himself in the head with a blank round loaded into a revolver at point-blank range. A scene had to be filmed an excessive number of times due to various onset problems interfering with the takes, so between takes Hexum picked up a prop revolver loaded with a blank, which be believed was completely harmless, to pantomime shooting himself in the head in order to make a frustrated coworker laugh. Hexum was unaware that blank rounds discharge a wad of plastic sealant when fired that can be dangerous at close-range to unprotected body-parts. The discharged material caused enough blunt force trauma to shatter a quarter-sized piece of his skull and project shards of it into his brain. Hexum was declared brain-dead six days later.

1985
-Jerome Moody, 31, drowned at a pool-party in New Orleans that was being hosted by and attended by more than 100 lifeguards. The party was being held to celebrate an entire summer-season with no drowning in any of the city’s pools.

1986
August
-More than 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock were killed due to a limnic eruption in three villages in the area surrounding Lake Nyos in Cameroon. This event was very similar to an eruption two years prior at Lake Monoun in the same country two years prior, but with this one causing significantly more casualties. The lake discharged 3,500,000,000 cubic feet of carbon dioxide which killed all oxygen-dependant life in a 15 mile radius. This was the second and last time in history a naturally-occurring limnic eruption has been observed.

1987
January
-Budd Dwyer, 47, the State Treasurer of Pennsylvania, committed suicide on live television during a televised press-conference. Dwyer was scheduled to be sentenced the following day on charges of conspiracy and corruption regarding him previously receiving bribes from a California accounting firm, and was potentially facing up to 55 years in prison. On January 22nd, 1987, he called a press-conference, which attending journalists assumed was where he planned to give his official resignation as Treasurer. Instead, he gave what was described as a “rambling” speech criticizing the American justice-system and professing his innocence. Concluding his speech, Dwyer handed three envelopes to three of his staff members, which later turned out to contain a suicide-note to his wife, an organ donor card, and a letter to the new governor of Pennsylvania. Dwyer then removed a manila envelope from his coat pocket and opened it to retrieve a loaded .357 Magnum revolver. Several attendees are heard pleading with him to put the gun down. Dwyer placed the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, killing himself instantly. The entire event was recorded by five separate news stations, and the suicide was seen as it happened by countless viewers at home due to the live broadcast.

April
-Dick Shawn, an American actor and standup comedian known for his roles in movies including It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Producers, died at the age of 63 in the middle of a standup routine at the University of California. Shawn suffered a heart-attack on stage and collapsed face-down, with many audience-members believing it was part of his act since just prior to collapsing he had been imitating political campaign slogans including “If elected, I will not lay down on the job”.

June
-Franco Braun, a 22-year-old prisoner at Toronto East Detention Centre, in Toronto, Ontario, choked to death after attempting to swallow and entire Gideon’s Bible.

1988
April
-Clarabelle Lansing, a 58-year-old flight attendant, was blown out of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 when a large section of the fuselage was torn-off of the plane mid-flight at a cruising altitude of 24,000 ft. due to an explosive decompression event. Her body was never found. The plane was eventually landed safely with no other fatalities.

-Ivan Lester McGuire, an experienced skydiver of 35 from Durham, North Carolina, filmed himself jumping out of a plane with a VHS camera, only to realize halfway into his fall that he had forgotten to put on a parachute before jumping. The tape he was making survived the incident and caught the entire ordeal on film and has become available on the Internet.

1989
March
-Michael Anderson Godwin, a 28-year-old prisoner at South Carolina’s Central Correctional Institute, was sentenced to death for murder and sexual assault. During a retrial he was found not guilty of sexual assault, and re-sentenced to life imprisonment. Back in his cell, Godwin tried to repair his television set whilst sitting naked on a metal toilet while the device was still plugged-in. He accidentally bit into the live electrical cord and was electrocuted instantly.

July
-Ole Bentzen, a Danish audiologist, died of sudden cardiac-arrest due to an intense laughing-fit suffered while watching the movie A Fish Called Wanda.

August
-H.B. Halicki, a 48-year-old director and writer, died onset while filming Gone In 60 Seconds 2 when a collapsing faux water-tower intended for a stunt fell prematurely, knocking over a telephone pole which struck him in the head. The accident resulted in the film being cancelled before completion.

1990
October
-10 sailors onboard the USS Iwo Jima in the Persian Gulf were killed in a steam blast when the boilers were fired and 850 degree Fahrenheit steam was projected into populated parts of the ship through leaks due to improper maintenance. Six sailors were killed instantly. Four more died later in the infirmary due to severe burns and steam-inhalation.

1991
April
-Yooket Paen, 57, of Angthong, Thailand, accidentally slipped on a muddy section of her farm, grabbed a naked live wire and was electrocuted. After the funeral, her sister, Yooket Pan, 52, was showing her neighbors how the accident occured by physically demonstrating what happened in the same location, causing her to slip and grab the same live wire and also be killed by electrocution.

-Joseph LaRose, a 31-year-old delivery man from Tampa, Florida, was killed when a 500 lb. rack of Nutty Buddy ice cream bars toppled over and landed on him during a delivery to a grocery store, crushing his skull.

June
-Sgt. Gregory Voelcker of the U.S. Air Force, who was stationed at Britain's Royal Air Force Mildenhall base, returned home from a temporary duty assignment in Greece to discover his wife and two children dead and partially decomposed in their home. Autopsies of the deceased revealed Lorraine Voelcker, 27, had died of natural causes (likely a sudden heart-attack), while the couple's two children, two-year-old Galen and 16-month-old Elizabeth, had died of dehydration and malnutrition, roughly ten days after their mother had died with no one to take care of them. The family lived in a relatively remote cottage outside of the village of Kirtling, so no one had stopped by in person to realize anything had happened. In addition, while the Air Force keeps a “Contact Policy” where it checks in on the families of servicemen while they are abroad, Lorraine Voelcker had informed the military the week before her death that she intended to take the family on a trip out of town the following week, so it raised no concern when the Air Force’s contact-call had received no answer the week she had died.

-Edward Juchniewicz, a 76-year-old man from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, died while being prepared to be transported to a doctor’s appointment via ambulance when the stretcher he was strapped to was left unattended and rolled down a hill. Juchniewicz suffered a head-injury in the resulting crash that proved fatal.

1993
March
-Brandon Lee, 28-year-old actor and son of Bruce Lee, died while filming the movie The Crow when he was shot with a .44 magnum revolver that was intended to be filled with blank rounds but had accidentally been left with a real round in the chamber.

October
-Michael A. Shingledecker, Jr., an 18-year-old from Polk, Pennsylvania, was killed when he was struck by a pickup truck after he and a friend laid-down on the yellow divider of a two-lane highway. The two men were copying a scene from the movie The Program (1993) in which Craig Sheffer’s character, Joe Kane, performs the same stunt to demonstrate his own lack of fear with several members of his football team joining him. This event actually caused Touchstone Pictures to remove this scene from all future releases of the movie.

July
-Garry Hoy, a 38-year-old lawyer in Toronto, Ontario, fell to his death after he threw himself against a window on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in an attempt to prove to a group of visitors that the glass was “unbreakable.” The glass did not break, but instead popped out of its frame, allowing Hoy to fall to his death in front of a group of horrified onlookers.

1994
February
-Anastasio Figueroa, a 41-year-old inmate of the Hendry Correctional Institution in Immokalee, Florida, jumped inside of a garbage truck departing from the prison in order to make an escape, not realizing it also functioned as a trash-compactor. The truck’s compactor crushed him to death before reaching its first destination.

June
-Jennifer Jones, a 15-year-old student from Palm Springs, Florida, died while trying to inhale Freon gas from her home’s air-conditioning unit in order to get high.

July
-Jeremy Brenno, a 16-year-old from Gloversville, New York, died after missing a shot on the sixth hole at the Kingsboro Gold Club when he vented his frustration by swatting his No. 3 Wood Club over a bench, causing the club to shatter and the broken shaft to bounce back and pierce his aorta.

1995
February
-A man whose name was not released to the press from Canberra, Australia, killed himself in a very extreme example of the phenomenon known as multiple gunshot suicide. He attempted to kill himself using a pump-action shotgun aimed through his chest. The load of buckshot tore a hole through his torso between his ribs but did not kill him. He reloaded the shotgun and then placed it against his throat before firing, which gutted his neck and blew off half of his jaw. This shot was also nonfatal. He then reloaded again and walked more than 450 ft. to a nearby hill, where he this time angled the shotgun against his chest and pulled the trigger with his toes. The buckshot passed through his chest cavity and destroyed his heart, ultimately killing him.

September
-Joe Buddy Caine, a 35-year-old man from Anniston, Alabama, died after he and a friend both became intoxicated and decided to play catch with each other with a live Rattlesnake. Both men suffered snake bites, but Caine was the only fatality.

1998
-Allen Wardle, 52, lived for six hours after falling 25 feet from a crane into a vat of molten zinc at a factory in Essex, UK, suffering burns over 100% of his body-surface. The liquefied metal was heated to over 850 degrees Fahrenheit at the time of the accident.

October
-All 11 members of the Bena Tshadi soccer team were killed simultaneously when lightning struck a soccer field during a match in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not a single member of the opposing Basanga team was harmed.

-Jonathan Capwell, a 16-year-old boy from Oldham, England, died of methane and butane-poisoning resulting from excessive use of aerosol spray-on deodorants.

December
-Luan Phi Dawson, a 33-year-old man visiting the Disneyland theme park in California for their Christmas Eve celebration, died after being struck in the head by a metal cleat used to secure the sailing ship Columbia. While docking, the cleat was pulled out of the dock under tension and sailed through the air at tremendous speed. Dawson was declared brain-dead two days later. One other guest and a park attendee were injured non-fatally in the accident. This event was notable for being the first death of a guest in Disneyland history that was the result of insufficient maintanence rather than a guest’s negligence in following safety-rules.

1999
May
-WWF wrestler Owen Hart, also known as “Blue Blazer”, fell to his death performing an entry-stunt during the Over the Edge pay-per-view event at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City. The stunt intended to have Hart lowered dramatically via stunt-cables to just above ring-level from the rafters and then have a quick-release activate to drop him face-first to comedic effect. The quick-release was accidentally triggered early during the stunt and Hart fell 78 ft. and landed chest-first on the rope, throwing him backwards into the ring. While the pay-per-view audience did not see the accident transpire due to delay in the live-feed in order to include a video vignette, the live audience for the event apparently thought the accident was an intended part of the show until the announcer stated otherwise.

July
-Eugene Aserinsky, a pioneer in Sleep Research and the discoverer or REM sleep, died when he fell asleep at the wheel of his car and collided with a tree.

September
-Three Palestinian suicide-bombers, whose names have not been released to the press, died when their suicide-vests detonated prematurely due to being set to Daylight Savings Time. The devices had been prepared in a Palestine-controlled area that had was still operating Daylight Savings Time, but the drivers for the attack had already switched to Standard Time and neglected to ask whose watch had been used to set the timing-mechanism. This resulted in the devices detonating an hour early, which killed all three men while they were still en route via car to their target destination.

-Hisashi Ouchi and Masato Shinohara, both technicians working at the Tokaimura Uranium Reprocessing Facility in the Naka District of Japan, died due to sudden and extreme radiation poisoning suffered during the Tokaimura Nuclear Accident. The accident resulted from the improper handling of high-purity uranium oxide being added to a steel container of uranyl nitrate which suddenly achieved critical mass and released a massive amount of gamma and neutron radiation. Both men collapsed and lost consciousness after making it to the decontamination room. After being taken to the hospital, the physical and mental condition of both men rapidly deteriorated. Their skin quickly began to fall off their bodies, and both men had a white blood cell count nearing zero. What little communication they were capable of rapidly deteriorated to indicate they were no longer in touch with reality. Ouchi additionally had is small intestines begin to gradually come apart as well as have his muscular tissue begin to separate from his bones. Ouchi, the man that had been closest to the tank at the time of the accident, died 82 days after the incident. Shinohara died 156 days after the initial incident. Both deaths were the result of “multiple severe organ-failures”. The Tokaimura Nuclear Accident was the worst civilian nuclear disaster in the history of Japan until the 2011 Fukushima Meltdown.

2000
February
-A man in Houston, Texas, whose name is being withheld from the press, died after shooting himself in the head with a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol in a game of Russian Roulette. The man apparently did not realize that unlike revolvers, which are typically used to play Russian Roulette, semiautomatic pistols load from a cartridge, meaning that so long as a bullet is loaded it will invariably be fired with the next pull of the trigger.

April
-Renato Di Paolo, an Italian actor, accidentally hung himself during a live play for Easter while portraying Judas in a scene where he hangs himself from a tree.

2001
July
-Michael Colombini, a 6-year-old boy from Corton-on-Hudson, New York, was killed during an MRI he was receiving at Westchester Regional Medical Center. When he started having breathing-problems while the MRI was being administered, the anesthesiologist on-duty requested that an oxygen-tank be brought in. When the tank was brought into the room, the intense magnetic field of the MRI machine pulled it through the air and into the patient-chamber, striking Colombini in the head and killing him.

October
-Gregory Biggs, a 37-year-old homeless man from Fort Worth, Texas, was struck while crossing the street by Chante Jawan Mallard, who was intoxicated at the time. Biggs became halfway lodged through the windshield of the car with severe but not immediately fatal injuries. Mallard was too intoxicated to register the event, and drove her car home and parked it in the garage for the night. Biggs died of his injuries several hours later. Mallard was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

2002
March
-Brittanie Cecil, a 13-year-old from Dayton, Ohio, died after being struck in the head by a hockey puck that was accidentally deflected into the crowd by Espen Knutsen at an NHL hockey match.

April
-Richard Sumner, a British artist suffering from schizophrenia, committed suicide by going out alone into a remote section of Clocaenog Forest in Denbighshire, Wales, handcuffing himself to a tree and throwing the keys out of his reach. His skeleton wasn’t discovered until three years later. There were signs present that indicate he may have later changed his mind after handcuffing himself and tried unsuccessfully to retrieve the keys.

2003
January
-Brandon Vedas, a 22-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, died of an accidental drug overdose while broadcasting live footage of himself using various recreational drugs (including psilocybin mushrooms and numerous prescription medications that included Temezapam, Vicodin and Methadone) on the Shroomy.org webcam chatroom. Logs from the chatroom reveal that users were reluctant to alert paramedics and law-enforcement when Vedas began to look like he was in need of assistance due to the illegal nature of his activities and not wanting to be responsible for incriminating him if it turned out he has simply lost consciousness.

May
-Jane McDonald, 31, from Airdrie, Scotland, died after she slipped and landed on a kitchen-knife sticking upright in her dishwasher.

August
-Rebecca Longhoffer, a 39-year-old mother of four, was electrocuted when she stepped on a cast-iron covering for electrical wiring in the sidewalk of one of the street-corners of the Vegas Strip. Heavy rains had flooded the compartment with standing water and deteriorated covers on the wiring allowed the water and conductive panel to become electrified.

-Damnoen Saen-um, a 52-year-old ice cream truck driver from Bangkok, Thailand, died while laughing in his sleep. His wife was unable to wake him during a sudden laughing-fit in his sleep that lasted two minutes, which caused him to die of heart-failure.

-Dr. Hitoshi Nikaidoh, a 35-year-old surgeon working at the Christus St. Jude’s Hospital in Houston, Texas, died when he was fully decapitated by an elevator. Improper maintenance of a hospital elevator caused the safeties to fail and the door to close on Nikaidoh’s head while he was still entering, and when the chamber ascended to the next floor it severed his head from his body.

October
-A 17-month-old girl from Croydon, Pennsylvania whose name was not released to the press was killed when she tripped and fell in front of the ride-on lawnmower her 8-year-old brother was driving and run-over, receiving severe injuries from the rotating blades.

December
-Ricardo Alfonso Cerna, a 47-year-old Guatemalan immigrant living in Muscoy, California, killed himself in the processing-area of a police-station while being recorded by a security-camera. Cerna had been pulled-over for a routine traffic violation and had attempted to flee on foot, during which he shot a pursing police officer non-fatally. Cerna was eventually subdued and taken into custody, but was not properly searched for concealed weapons. When the officer attending to him left the room to retrieve some paperwork, Cerna withdrew a .45 caliber pistol he had hidden in the waistband of his pants and shot himself point-blank in the side of the head. Cerna’s motive was most likely to avoid being sentenced to life in prison after the attempted murder of a police officer or being executed by the drug-cartel he worked for if they found out he was arrested. The footage captured by the security-camera of Cerna’s suicide eventually leaked onto the Internet, and it is often included in instructional material for new police officers as an example of why detainees must be thoroughly searched for weapons.

2004
February
-A 38-year-old employee of Disney World, whose name has not been released to the press, died while performing in a Pluto costume during the Share a Dream Come True Parade when he was run-over by Beauty & the Beast float.

March
-A 31-year-old man from Chengdu, China, whose name was not released to the press, collapsed and died of exhaustion at an Internet Café after playing the online game Saga for 20 straight hours.

May
-A 45-year-old woman from Taiwan, whose name was not released to the press, died of alcohol intoxication after immersing herself in a bathtub that was 40% ethanol, for 12 straight hours. At the time of her discovery, she had a blood alcohol content of 1.35%. Her family told the press that her motivation for doing so was due to believing that she could decontaminate herself from exposure to the SARS virus with antiseptic alcohol.

August
-Francis “Franky” Brohm, 23, of Marietta, Georgia, was leaning out of a car window and was decapitated by a telephone pole support-wire. The car’s intoxicated driver, John Hutcherson, 21, drove nearly 12 miles to his home with the headless body in the passenger seat, parked the car in his driveway, and then went to bed. A neighbor saw the bloody corpse still in the car and notified police. Brohm’s head was later discovered at the accident scene.

October
-Robert Halvorsen, a 21-year-old employee of Eastern Roofing Corp. from South Windsor, England, died when he fell 30 ft. off of a roof into a basin of 500 degree Fahrenheit liquid roofing tar. Two coworkers immediately attempted to pull Halverson out, suffering severe burns in the process, though Halvorsen was discovered to already be dead by the time they were able to remove him.

November
-Phillip Quinn, a 24-year-old from Kent, Washington, died when his lava-lamp exploded after he tried to accelerate its heating on a stove-top. The glass fixture exploded under the building internal pressure which caused a piece of glass shrapnel to pierce his aorta.

2005
January
-Dereck Kieper, a 21-year-old UNL student and Anti-Seatbelt Law advocate from Nebraska, died in a car-accident that was determined to have been survivable had he been wearing his seatbelt.

May
-Xiao Yi, a 13-year-old boy from the Tianjin Province in China, killed himself by jumping from the 24th floor of an apartment building. In his suicide-notes he explained his motivation for killing himself was his current “addiction” to online video games and that he believed he would be united with three of his fellow gaming friends in Heaven. The suicide-note was also notably written from the perspective of one of his fictional video game characters, rather than from the perspective of Xiao Yi himself.

July
-Kenneth Pinyan, a 45-year-old zoophile that went by the Internet nickname of “Mr. Hands” and engineer for American Boeing living in Gig Harbor, Washington, died of peritonitis caused by traumatic perforation of the colon resulting from having a full-grown stallion have anal-sex with him at an Enumclaw farm. The incident was filmed by two other accomplices, which was later made available on the Internet.

-Francisco Prendroza, a 23-year-old factory-worker at the Automation Plating Corporation in Marana, Arizona, died after a piece of moving equipment pushed him off a ledge and he fell head-first into a 250 gallon, 6ft. deep tank of Trivalent Chromate, an extremely powerful industrial acid used to coat circuit-boards. Two coworkers pulled him from the tank and he was taken to a hospital for treatment of chest and spine injuries as well as severe chemical-burns over 70% of his body’s surface. He succumbed to his injuries within two hours.

August
-Lee Seung Seop, a 28-year-old industrial repairman from Taegu, South Korea, died of exhaustion after playing the online video game StarCraft at an Internet Café for 50 consecutive hours.

October
-Franco Scoglio, an Italian football manager and sports commentator, died of a heart-attack while hosting a live television show during a heated phone-debate over football with the channel’s chairman, Enrico Preziosi. Scoglio passed-out and fell out of his chair while Preziosi continued his argument, unaware of what had happened.

2006
January
-An airline mechanic whose name has not been released to the press was sucked into an active jet-engine of a Boeing 737-500 at El Paso International Airport while performing routine maintenance on the grounded plane.

September
-Steve Irwin, a 44-year-old television-personality and conservationist known as “The Crocodile Hunter”, died when his aorta was pierced by the barb of a stingray while filming a nature documentary called Ocean’s Deadliest at the Great Barrier Reef.

November
-Malachi Ritscher, a 52-year-old musician and recording-engineer, set himself on fire and burned to death on the side of the Kennedy Expressway during morning rush-hour in downtown Chicago in what he claimed in a suicide-note to be an act of protest against the Iraq War.

2007
March
-Kevin Whitrick, a 42-year-old electrical-engineer and father of two, killed himself via hanging during a live webcam broadcast in a Paltalk.com chatroom in front of a an audience of more than 60 other users.

September
-Fernando Gonzalez, an 18-year-old employee of the Costal Circuits factory in Redwood City, California, died when he passed-out from fumes and fell into a vat of sulfuric acid. His partially dissolved body was discovered by his father several hours later who went looking for him after he failed to come home from his shift at work.

2008
March
-Abigail Taylor, a 6-year-old girl from Edina, Minnesota, died nine months after she had suffered an injury at the Minneapolis Golf Club where sitting-down on an excessively powerful drain in a wading-pool had caused large portions of her lower intestines and her pancreas to be sucked-out through her anus. An attempt was made to transplant a new pancreas and set of intestines, but she succumbed to a range of rare transplant-related cancers.

July
-A 15-year-old boy from Stoney Mountain, Canada, whose name is being withheld from the press, died after being buried alive in scalding asphalt while helping a road-crew unload it from a front-end loader.

October
-Carol Hickey, a 43-year-old mother of four from Limerick, Ireland, died of an intense allergic-reaction to dog-semen after having sex with a German Sheppard.

November
-David Phyall, 50, was the last resident being evicted from a block of apartments due to be demolished in Bishopstoke, England. Rather than move, he decapitated himself with a chainsaw as a form of protest over the eviction.

-Abraham K. Biggs, 19, streamed his own suicide via webcam on the popular Justin.tv streaming website. He advertised the event starting 12 hours beforehand and had a sizeable audience by the time he had appointed the event to take place. While on camera he intentionally overdosed on opiates and benzodiazepine. Many of the viewers believed at the time that it was an elaborate hoax. Paramedics and law enforcement arrived after being notified by viewers that had noticed Biggs had stopped breathing, although by the time of their arrival he had already been dead for several hours.

-Nordin Montag, a 32-year-old janitor at the Singapore Zoo, committed suicide in full view of zoo-attendees by entering an enclosure for White Tigers and letting them eat him alive. The event was recorded by one of the zoo’s guests and has since been made available on the Internet.

2009
January
-Timothy Brueggeman, a 51-year-old electrician from Hayward, Wisconsin, began sleepwalking in the middle of the night and left his home wearing nothing but a pair of boxers in weather that was 15 degrees below zero. He froze to death about 570 feet away from his house while still walking in his sleep.

February
-A 14-year-old boy in China, whose name is being withheld from the press, was killed when the gas-canister (a common component used to raise and lower the seat) of the office-chair he was sitting in abruptly ruptured and launched metal shards upward at high speed through his rectum.

-Guido Salvador Carabajo-Jara, a 26-year-old from Queens, New York, was struck by an SUV while crossing the street and then impaled on the undercarriage of an oncoming van. His body was dragged around the city for nearly 20 miles before a pedestrian informed the driver of the van of what had happened. The two initial impacts were captured on film by a security-camera and have since been leaked onto the Internet.

-Sergey Tuganov, a 28-year-old man from Russia, died of a sudden heart-attack during a three-way with two prostitutes whom he made a $4,300 bet with, saying that he could continuously have sex with them for 12 straight hours. The cause of Tuganov’s heart-attack was determined to be due to ingesting an entire bottle of Viagra before the three-way began.

-Vladimir Likhonos, a 25-year-old Ukrainian chemistry student, died after accidentally dipping a piece of homemade bubble-gum he was chewing into a tin of powdered explosive chemicals, which reacted with his saliva when he put it back into his mouth, instantly blowing-off half of his head. Likhonos liked to add citric acid to his bubble-gun to increase its flavor and kept a tin of it on his work-desk for dipping. At the time he was using an explosive compound for a chemistry project that heavily resembled his usual citric acid, and he apparently accidentally confused the two.

April
-Dianne Durre, a 49-year-old woman from Chambers, Nebraska, died when a 75 ft. pole holding a fiberglass sign for a Taco Bell location snapped under the stress of high winds and fell on top of her car.

June
-Kirk and Johanna Ganthaler, an Italian couple vacationing in Brazil, were initially scheduled to return to Europe on Air France Flight 447. They arrived too late to catch their plane and were forced to take another flight departing later that day. Air France Flight 447 crashed midflight in the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 passengers and crew aboard. When the couple arrived in Munich, Germany, they rented a car to drive home to Italy and were killed in a traffic-accident with a truck later that day.

July
-Vincent Smith, Jr., a 29-year-old technician at the Cocoa Services Inc. Factory in Camden, New Jersey, died when he slipped and fell into a vat of 120 degree Fahrenheit liquefied Hershey’s Chocolate and was struck in the head by a rotating mixing-paddle.

2010
March
-Jenny Mitchell, a 19-year-old hairdresser from England died when the interior of her car exploded when fumes leaking from cans of hair-spray she had in the back seat of her car were ignited when she lit a cigarette.

-Robert Gary Jones, a 38-year-old father of two, was killed while jogging and listening to his iPod on a beach on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, when a personal aircraft struck him from behind while making an emergency landing.

April
-A young Muslim woman from Sydney, Australia, whose name has not been released to the press, died of strangulation during a go-kart race when her burkha became tangled in the axel of the rear wheels.

October
-20 crew-members and passengers died in a plane-crash near Bandundu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when an alligator one of the passengers was smuggling in a sports-bag escaped. The people on board panicked and ran to the flight deck, causing the relatively small Filair L-410 Turbolet to become unbalanced and crash.

-A 40-year-old man using a mobility-scooter whose name has not been released to the press from Daejon, South Korea, died when he fell 20 ft. down a shopping center elevator shaft. Missing his chance to catch a ride on the elevator before it departed, the man rammed his mobility-scooter against the closed elevator doors in anger. This accidentally broke them open, and the man’s scooter fell with him down the open shaft. The entire incident was caught on security-camera and has since been made available on the Internet.

December
-Alan Cattaral, a 54-year-old man working for Pyranha Mouldings Ltd was roasted alive when he entered an industrial oven designed to bake plastic at more than 530 degrees Fahrenheit in order to perform repairs. He was locked inside when his future son-in-law unknowingly started the oven’s baking process with him still inside. Cattaral attempted to break his way out using a crowbar before succumbing to severe burns.

-A Chechnyan terrorist, whose name has not been released to the press, had planned to perpetrate a suicide-bombing at the Red Square New Year celebration in Moscow with a phone-activated suicide-vest. However, while assembling the device in her safe-house, the cell phone she was using received an automatic text-message sent by the service-provider to all its customers wishing them a happy New Year. This activated the explosives prematurely, killing her instantly.

2011
March
-Barrie Hepburn, a 65-year-old paraplegic from London, bled to death after trying to amputate his own legs with a hacksaw. Hepburn had lost the use of his legs when he was shot three times by a neighbor during an argument in 2000. Performing self-surgery on his kitchen floor, he almost completely severed his right leg by slowly sawing through it before calling paramedics and telling them that he was suffering heavy blood-loss. He bled to death before they arrived.

May
-Acton Beale, a 20-year-old from Brisbane, Australia, is the only person known to have died while participating in the Internet fad known as “Planking” after he fell from a balcony while preparing to photograph himself.

June
-Michael Marin, a 53-year-old Wall Street trader and father of four from Phoenix, Arizona, killed himself in court during the reading of his guilty verdict. Marin was on trial for insurance fraud after a forensic investigation of the aftermath of his 3.5 million dollar mansion burning down indicated arson. Potentially facing a sentence of up to 21 years in prison, Marin swallowed a cyanide tablet he had purchased online and concealed during the trial and died in minutes. The incident was recorded and has since been made available on the Internet.

July
-Philp A. Contos, a 55-year-old motorcyclist from Parish, New York, died during a protest-ride against mandatory helmet laws for motorcyclists when his 1983 Harley Davidson fishtailed and threw him over the handlebars. The crash was determined to have been fully survivable had he been wearing his helmet.

September
-Brian Depledge, a 38-year-old father of two from Bradford, England, died after tripping and falling into a folding laundry-drying rack and getting his head caught between the rungs, strangling himself to death.

December
-Charlene Ferraro, a 55-year-old waitress from Oaklyn, New Jersey, walked several blocks from her home into Newton Lake while sleepwalking and drowned.

2012
January
-Martin Lara, 50, of Applegate, California, was decapitated when he was pulled head-first into an industrial wood chipper when a piece of rope attached to his clothing got caught in the machine’s internal workings.

February
-Chen Rong-yu, a 23-year-old from New Taipei City in Taiwan, died from a heart-attack caused by blood-clots that resulted from fatigue, lack of movement and the cold climate after playing the online video game League of Legends for 23 hours straight at an Internet Café.

April
-Kamran Kahn, a 13-year-old from Peshawar, Pakistan, doused himself with gasoline and then burned himself alive because his family could not afford to buy him a new school-uniform.

May
-Robert Gene White, a 67-year-old man from El Paso, Texas, died of a sudden heart-attack while receiving several lap-dances at a strip club. White was not discovered to be dead until afterwards when an employee approached him to ask him about payment.

-Michael McAleese, an unemployed 44-year-old man from Bournemouth, UK, killed himself with an overdose of medication. In his suicide-note he indicated that he had killed himself over the death of his pet cat the previous week.

June
-Jay Luther, 47, the owner of a Nashville restaurant was killed by carbon dioxide fumes from dry ice after he accidentally locked himself inside a walk-in refrigeration-unit.

-Han Hyon-Gyong, a 14-year-old girl from North Korea, drowned while trying to save portraits of Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung from her home during a flash-flood.

-Isabella Rushing, age 3, was at a funeral home attending a viewing of a recently deceased relative with her family in West Memphis, Arkansas, when the driver of an SUV on a nearby road had a seizure at the wheel and crashed through the wall of the building, killing her instantly.

-Jiang Xiaoshan, a 26-year-old from Changsha, China, died of sleep-deprivation and exhaustion after going 11 days and nights straight without sleep in an attempt to watch every single Euro 2012 soccer game.

-Ashton Jojo, an 11-year-old girl from New York, was electrocuted in an artificial pond at an Orland Lake Resort Mini-Golf course in Florida. A faulty water-pump had electrified the pond which killed her when she went to retrieve a stray golf ball.

-Olga Gaikovich, a 29-year-old woman from Syktyvkar, Russia, was killed when a lone brick came loose from an oncoming construction-supplies truck and crashed through the windshield of the vehicle she was riding as a passenger in, striking her in the head while her boyfriend was driving. The incident was captured on a dash-cam mounted in the vehicle and the tape has since made it onto the Internet. The footage also captures her boyfriend’s emotional reaction.

July
-Adaisha Miller, a 24-year-old woman from Detroit died after she hugged an off-duty police officer at her birthday party, causing his holstered handgun to accidentally discharge. The bullet passed through her chest and into her heart and lungs.

-Erica Marshall, a 28-year-old veterinarian from Ocala, Florida, died in an explosion when a horse she was treating in a high-oxygen chamber kicked the wall, generating a spark from its horseshoe that caused the oxygen-rich atmosphere in the chamber to combust.

August
-Austin Tyler Zalik, a 21-year-old U.S. Naval Academy midshipman from Pennsylvania, died after falling asleep in his pickup truck in the parking lot of a gas station. He bumped the gear-lever in his sleep sending his truck into neutral, causing it to roll down an embankment and be struck by an oncoming tractor-trailer.

-A scooter-rider on a road in Yuhuan, China, whose name has not been released to the press, died after pulling out in front of a truck carrying 10 tons of liquid tar. The truck swerved to avoid him and overturned, spilling its payload of tar heated to more than 210 degrees Fahrenheit on top of him. Firefighters had to use heat-resistant footwear to be able to stand close enough to dig the man out. He was dead by the time he was extricated.

-Zailan Hamid, a 40-year-old gravedigger from Mentakab, Malaysia, was buried alive when the grave he was digging collapsed on him.

September
-Isaac Young, a 22-year-old soldier, was accidentally shot by fellow soldier Patrick Edward Myers in an attempt to cure his hiccups. Young was suffering from a bout of hiccups and Myers drew a gun to scare him. The gun accidentally discharged, killing Young.

-Terry Vance Garner, a 69-year-old farmer from Coos County, Oregon, was eaten alive by his own livestock pigs. Only a few body-parts and his dentures remained by the time of discovery.

-Abdullah Ismail of Lahore, Pakistan, died of complications due to smoke-inhalation after inhaling the smoke of the United States Flag he was burning to publicly protest the film The Innocence of Muslims.

-David Nuno, a 15-year-old from Chula Vista, California, died after attempting a technique he and a friend saw on YouTube that demonstrated how to cause yourself to pass-out from hyperventilation. Nuno attempted the technique and succeeded, passing –out while standing and falling forward, landing on a glass drinking-glass that gashed his throat.

-Jodon F. Romero, 33, led police on a high-speed chase through Phoenix, Arizona, that was covered via helicopter by Fox News.  Romero ended the chase by exiting his car and shooting himself in the head with a handgun while the broadcast was still live.

October
-23 guests at a wedding in Saudi Arabia were killed instantly via electrocution when outdoor celebratory gunfire knocked down an overhead electrical power-line.

2013
February
-Linda J. Knauss was shot non-fatally during a hold-up outside a boutique in 1982 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. More than 30 years later in 2013, at the age of 65, she died of complications from the gunshot-wound she had suffered. The death was officially ruled to be a homicide.

March
-Monica Gooden, a 20-year-old from Lauderhill, Florida, was beaten to death with a Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console after being stabbed multiple times by her boyfriend, Darrius Johnson. In addition to the bizarre method by which the murder was committed, Johnson claimed his motive for killing his girlfriend was that “she had control over his spirit” and that he had to “sacrifice” someone with a Taurus astrological sign in order to undo the supposed supernatural curse.

April
-Hugo Chanon, a 41-year-old sanitation worker that was hired as part of a team to perform sanitation maintenance at the Interstate Meat Distributors plant in Clackamas, Oregon, died when he fell into an active industrial-sized meat-grinder.

-Lee Halpin, a 26-year-old film-maker from Heaton, UK, froze to death while making a documentary about Homelessness. Attempting to “immerse himself in the life of a homeless person”, he began living as one in order to experience the subject of his documentary first-hand and consequently died.

June
-Evgeny Titov, a 29-year-old man from Lipetsk, Russia, was watching the demolition of a building and filming it with his phone-camera, when he was struck and killed by falling debris. The entire event was caught on the recording he was making, which was eventually made available on the Internet.

July
-Ye Meng Yuan, 16, a Chinese passenger of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 which crashed at San Francisco International Airport, had survived the plane crash, but was killed immediately afterwards by a fire-truck running her over while arriving to put out the fire.

-Brendon Mackey, a 7-year-old boy from Midlothian, Virginia, died during a 4th of July party when a .40 caliber bullet fell from the sky and hit him in the head after being shot upwards in celebratory fire.

August
-Oaklee Sidwell, a 9-year-old girl from Garfield County, Utah, was sitting on a trampoline in her back yard when a sudden gust of wind carried the entire structure of the trampoline 150 feet away and around 30 feet in the air. She fell from it about halfway into the flight and later died of her injuries.

-Milenko Doroslovac, a 40-year-old tree-worker in Kitchener, Canada, died when he accidently cut his own safety-line with a chainsaw and fell to his death.

-Doug Gripp, a 52-year-old church volunteer from Nobelsville, Indiana, died outside of Grace Community Church when the propane grill he was preparing for an event to help feed the homeless suddenly exploded. There were five people standing around the grill at the time of the incident, but not a single one of the remaining four people was even injured.

September
-Nasir Shaikh, a 26-year-old repairman from Mumbai, India, was killed in a pressure-explosion when two compressors for a mall’s air-conditioning system simultaneously violently ruptured.

-Roman Pirozek Jr., a 19-year-old toy-helicopter enthusiast from Brooklyn, died when his remote-controlled helicopter fell from the sky and the rotor-blades gashed his head and throat.

-Astrid Marmont, a 41-year-old mother of three from Filmore, California, died of shrapnel-wounds after the propane-torch used to light a grill at a barbeque was placed too close to the open flames and exploded.

December
-A glass panel was stolen from the guard-rail of the 33rd floor of an apartment building in Shenzhen, China. Hours later a 1-year-old girl fell to her death through the gap.

2014
February
-Kazuki Tada, a 23-year-old technician at the Nippon Denko plant in Anan, Japan, died when a bucket containing 13 tons of liquefied metal alloys heated to more than 2,350 degrees Fahrenheit was accidentally overbalanced and spilt on top of him.

-A 36-year-old father of three from Independence Township, Michigan, whose name has not been released to the press, killed himself when he accidentally shot himself in the head while demonstrating proper gun-safety to his girlfriend. After believing he had unloaded all three of his handguns, he put them to his head and pulled the trigger with each in rapid succession. The third firearm had not been unloaded properly. He was pronounced dead on the scene by paramedics.

March
-Manny Edward, 18, died after running face-first into a bus-stop sign in Birmingham, England, while chasing a bus he was late for.

April
-Courtney Sanford, a 32-year-old woman from North Carolina, died in a head-on collision immediately after posting a “Selfie” to Facebook while driving.

June
-Sean Moylan, the 27-year-old grandson of Golden Gate Suicide-Barrier advocate John Moylan, committed suicide by throwing himself off the Golden Gate Bridge.

-Newlyweds and parents of three children Christina Munroz and Nicholas Cruz of Texas both died when they collided with each other head-on in separate cars on a narrow country road outside of where they worked.

July
-Carl Rubisch, 30, died while hunting rabbits in Shropshire, England, when the trigger of his shotgun got caught in the zipper on his boot and the weapon discharged into his face.

August
-A 17-year-old girl in Moscow, whose name has not been released to the public, died of electrocution while bathing when she dropped her charging iPad into the bath-water.

-Oscar Otero Aguilar, 21, of Mexico City, Mexico, accidentally shot himself in the head while posing for a “Selfie” with a loaded gun.

-Peng Fan, a chef working in Shenzen, China, died after being bitten by the severed head of a cobra that he was preparing for soup. The snake had been decapitated for more than 20 minutes before biting him.

October
-A 10-year-old boy from Thane, India, whose name has not been released to the press, died while using a public bathroom when the facility’s septic-tank suddenly exploded. The vents of the tank had become clogged, allowing volatile gas to build for an extended period of time before violently combusting due to an unknown ignition-source. The explosion caused a heavy metal lid for the tank to be launched through the air, which then landed on his head.

2015
April
-Hyon Yong Chol, the Armed Forces Minister of North Korea, was publicly executed in front of an audience of hundreds of people at a shooting-range in Pyongyang’s Kang Kon Military Academy using anti-aircraft gunfire. His execution was apparently ordered by Kim Jong-Un as punishment for falling asleep during a meeting.

July
-Xiang Liujuan, 30, was killed at the Anliang Mall in Jingzhou, China, when the floor-panel at the top of an escalator collapsed and she was pulled into the moving mechanical components underneath. Liujuan had just enough time to save her 2-year-old child by pushing him to a nearby employee before she was crushed to death. The entire incident was caught on a security-camera and has made its way onto the Internet. It took four hours for firefighters to recover what was left of her body. It is believed that management at the mall knew about the escalator’s poor state of repair and neglected to report it, and is potentially criminally liable for the event.

August
-Chris Hyndman, a 49-year-old Canadian television-host, died when he fell from the terrace of his sixth floor apartment while sleepwalking.

September
-Latori Barman, a 45-year-old farm-laborer from Madhya Pradesh, India, was accidentally buried alive by a team of road-workers. Barman had been walking home while heavily intoxicated and fell into a large pothole where he passed-out for the night. That same night, crews of road-workers were repairing potholes, and without seeing Barman lying down inside of one they filled it in with liquid asphalt and ran it over with a steam-roller. The accident was only discovered the next morning when part of a human arm was seen sticking through a part of the road’s surface and the section of asphalt was exhumed.