People granted a Darwin Awards for the most
stupid deaths ! All these cases are real !
Midnight Phone Call
1992 Darwin Awards Winner
Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot
himself to death in December in Newton, N. C., when,
awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he
reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson
.38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.
The Last Supper
1993 Darwin Awards Winner
A terrible diet and room with no
ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who
was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but
autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His
diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage. It was just
the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in
his sleep from breathing the poisonous cloud that was hanging
over his bed. Had he been outside or had his windows been opened,
it wouldn't have been fatal. But the man was shut up in his near
airtight bedroom. He was a big man with a huge capacity for
creating this deadly gas. Three of the rescuers got sick and one
was hospitalized. Unknown, 25 March 1993
Junk Food Junkie
1994 Darwin Awards Winner
This year's Darwin Award went to the
fellow who was killed by a Coke machine, which toppled over on
top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it.
Count your Chickens
1995 Darwin Awards Winner
Six people drowned Monday while trying
to rescue a chicken that had fallen into a well in southern
Egypt. An 18 year old farmer was the first to descend into the
60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the
water pulled him down, police said his sister and two brothers,
none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but
also drowned. Two elderly farmers then came to help. But they
apparently were pulled by the same undercurrent. The bodies of
the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of
Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo. The chicken was also
pulled out. It survived.
Jet Assisted Take-Off
1995 Darwin Awards Runner Up
The Arizona Highway Patrol, when they
came upon a pile of smoldering metal imbedded into the side of a
cliff rising above the road, at the apex of a curve. The wreckage
resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The
type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. The folks in the lab
finally figured out what it was, and what had happened.
It seems that a former Air Force Sergeant had
somehow got hold of a JATO unit, (Jet Assisted Take Off unit,
actually a solid-fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military
transport planes an extra `push' for taking off from short
airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert,
and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the
JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed, and fired off
the JATO! Best as they could determine, he was doing somewhere
between 250 and 300 mph (350-420kph) when he came to that
curve.... The brakes were completely burned away, apparently from
trying to slow the car.
Most of the driver's remains were not
recoverable; however, small fragments of bone, teeth, and hair
were extracted from the crater, and fingernail and bone shards
were removed from the steering wheel.
Wayne Roth, 38, of Pittston, PA,
was bitten by a cobra belonging to his friend, Roger Croteau,
after playfully reaching into the tank and picking up the snake.
Wayne subsequently refused to go to a hospital, telling Roger,
"I'm a man, I can handle it." Falser words have seldom
been spoken. Instead of a hospital, Wayne reported to a bar. He
had three drinks, and enjoyed bragging that he had just been
bitten by a cobra. Cobra venom is a slow-acting central nervous
system toxin. He died within a few hours, in Jenkins Township,
Pennsylvania. (November 1997)
Eric A. Barcia, a 22-year-old
Reston Virginia resident, was found dead yesterday after he used
bungee cords to jump off a 70-foot railroad trestle, police said.
The fast food worker taped a number of bungee cords together and
strapped one end around his foot. Barcia had the foresight to
anchor the other end to the trestle at Lake Accotink Park, and he
even remembered to measure the length of the bungee cords to make
sure that they were a few feet short of the 70 foot drop. He
proceeded to fall headfirst from the trestle, and hit the
pavement 70 feet below several seconds later. Fairfax County
police said "The stretched length of the cord that he had
assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and
the ground." Perhaps the deceased fast food worker should
have stuck to the line, "Do you want fries with that?"
A security guard intending to
impress female friends took a deadly gamble, losing his game of
Russian roulette at a La Paz fast-food restaurant.
Police say Victor Alba, 21, died
instantly Saturday when he put his .38-caliber revolver to his
head and pulled the trigger at a suburban hamburger outlet. Alba
was trying to "impress some female friends," according
to the newspaper Hoy de La Paz.
Randy Nestor, 28, was a considerate
car thief. When the stolen cars became hot, he didn’t just
abandon them, he torched them. Setting the cars on fire, he
reasoned, helped the owners collect insurance on their vehicles.
This criminal habit became his downfall. After a 10-year career
of theft, Randy burned to death in Pittsburgh, PA in a van which
he had set fire to from the inside. He hadn’t realized that
the door handle on the driver’s side was broken. Friends
tried to release him, but the door was locked. His burned body
was found inside the van on Sunday, 1 March 1998.
Did he win the argument? It
happened in February 1998 in a working-class Boedo neighborhood
in Buenos Aires. During a heated marital dispute, a 25-year-old
man picked up his 20-year-old wife and threw her off their
eighth-floor apartment balcony. To his dismay, she became tangled
in the power lines below. He immediately leapt from the balcony
and fell towards his wife. We can only speculate as to his
reasons. Was he angrily trying to finish the job, or was he
remorsefully hoping to rescue her? He did not accomplish either
goal. He missed the power lines completely, and plunged to his
death. The woman managed to swing over to a nearby balcony and
was saved.
There are safe methods of
lighting fireworks. There are dangerous methods of lighting
fireworks. Two residents of villages in East Java were killed
when they chose the latter method of ignition.
Firecrackers are illegal in
Indonesia. However, they can be purchased from the black market
during celebrations such as Idul Fitri. And boys will be boys,
the world over. In January, Isomudin, a 28-year-old resident of
Kenongo, and Matkijo, a 20-year-old from Telasih, obtained a
large quantity of firecrackers and connected their detonation
fuses to a motorcycle battery. The two perpetrators proceeded to
start the engine. The resulting explosion could be heard from a
distance of two kilometers.
Onlookers attempted to rescue
Isomudin and Matkijo, but their burns were too severe. Both men
died at the scene. Eight onlookers were treated at a local
hospital for their injuries.