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| Darwin Awards [1998] |
| These awards are given each year to bestow upon (the remains of) that individual, who through single-minded self-sacrifice, has done the most to remove undesirable elements from the human gene pool. 1998 Darwin Award Nominees (01 March 1998) 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. 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 Eid Al-Fitr, the feast which marks the end of Ramadan. 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. (28 April 1998) Bob Herschler, 77, of Olympia, WA, died from burns suffered last week after he placed a smoldering pipe in his shirt pocket. The pipe ignited a book of matches and soon Bob's clothing was ablaze. Family members quickly extinguished the fire, but not before he suffered third-degree burns to his chest and abdomen. The Thurston County resident died at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle of pneumonia brought on by his burns. (31 March 1998) In a related story, the life of Reiva Nix, a 67-year-old grandmother living in Egdewood, TX, was claimed in a tragic accident on March 31. She was cleaning her tennis shoes with gasoline when a nearby candle ignited the shoes which Reiva was still wearing. Alone at the time of the accident, she ran next door for help, and her neighbor extinguished the fire with a water hose. She died from burn wounds at 2AM at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Investigators noted that her flammable 65% polyester clothing contributed to the blaze. Chief Corbett said several people have told him they clean their shoes with gasoline. He cautioned others to be careful when using gasoline in any way. A Melbourne, Australia man was playing basketball with his brother and 16-year-old cousin, using a hoop affixed to his garage. After slam-dunking the ball, he hung on the rim for a triumphant moment. The bricks gave way and the wall collapsed on the 20-year-old man, fatally crushing him. His name was withheld by authorities, at the request of his family. Melbourne, Australia is not the safest place to play basketball. Ryan Maloney, 19, died in 1996 in a public basketball court when the ring collapsed on him after a dunk. The coroner recommended that dunking basketballs be banned. No heed was taken of his words. The tradition is still practiced throughout the world. (16 June 1998, Illinois) A man drowned in Fox Lake after he and a friend inadvertently blasted a hole in the bottom of their rowboat with a quarter stick of dynamite. Daniel, twenty-nine, and his unidentified friend were relaxing on the lake on Sunday in a fourteen-foot aluminum boat, when they decided to toss the M-250 explosive into the water. They intended to kill fish with the blast, not themselves, said chief deputy coroner Jim Wipper. A sudden gust of wind pushed their boat over the firecracker, and the boat sank about a hundred yards from shore. Daniel drowned; the friend swam safely to land. (1998, NJ) An unidentified 29 year old male choked to death on a sequined pastie he had orally removed from an exotic dancer at a Phillipsburg establishment. "I didn't think he was going to eat it," the dancer identified only as "Ginger" said, adding "He was really drunk." (25 April 1998, Massachusetts) One fateful day in April, a private pilot landed his Piper PA-32-300 at the New Bedford airport. To secure his aircraft against thieves, he inserted a gust lock into the co-pilot's control column, and padlocked it in place. This procedure is fairly common, except that the gust lock is usually placed on the pilot's control column. That way it's hard to forget it when you prepare to depart. Many gust locks have a big red plate that hangs down to cover the ignition and master switch. We will never know why our soon to be dead friend chose to put the gust lock on the co-pilot's side. The pilot went off to have some drinks and returned to his plane at 10:30 PM. He hopped into the aircraft with 155 mg/dL of ethanol in his blood, and departed without remembering to check that the flight controls were unobstructed. A witness to the accident reported that he departed the runway at a very steep angle, consistent with having a gust lock installed. About this time, our erstwhile friend realized that he forgot to remove the gust lock, and that his plane will soon stall. The real problem is that the key for the padlock is on the same keyring as the key for the ignition. So he had two choices: try to remove the padlock key from the keyring while keeping the plane running, which will take more time than he has, or turn off the engine, which will accelerate the stall, then rush to remove the gust lock and restart the engine. He chose option B. But he didn't make it in time. The airplane, its course fixed by the gust lock, "went straight up in the air like an acrobat" then appeared to level off, turn northwest, then northeast, followed by "a nose dive" and a rapid descent to the ground. When the National Transportation Safety Board investigator arrived at the scene he discovered the padlock and gust lock still installed and the keyring with both keys still on it on the floor of the cockpit. (29 July 1998, England) Jonathan was discovered dead by his sister Natalie in Manchester. His body was found surrounded by cans of aerosol deodorant in the bedroom of his home in Whitebank Road. Attempts to revive him failed. The 17-year-old apparently bathed four times a day. His father Keith reported that his Jonathan doused his entire body in several kinds of deodorant at least twice a day, a routine begun six months before he died. His parents often complained they could "taste" the aerosols downstairs. "When we told him he was using too much, he said he just wanted to smell good," his father recalled. "What a price to pay for smelling nice." It is hypothesized that propane and butane, primary propellants in aerosol sprays, built up in Jonathan's body during months of high use. His blood contained 0.37mg/L of each toxin, nearly ten times the lethal dosage, when he suffered cardiac arrest. The coroner, Barrie Williams, recorded a verdict of accidental death, citing no evidence of substance abuse. "He was simply overcome by excessive use of anti-perspirants in a confined space." Jonathan's mother Louise is calling for more prominent warnings on deodorant canisters. "We knew he didn't go in for solvent abuse. He was just being very meticulous about his grooming." Sue Rogers, from the British Aerosol Manufacturing Association, said the death was tragic but reiterated the aerosol deodorants are perfectly safe (31 October 1998, Canada) For Halloween this year, a Canadian man named Gary dressed as a mummy by wrapping himself from head to toe in fluffy cotton batting. The cotton was taped at the wrists and ankles, and white gloves and running shoes completed his fashionable ensemble. As the mummy was waiting in the kitchen for his girlfriend to dress for pictures of their costumes, he carelessly lit a cigarette... and burst into flames, as the flammable costume ignited. His girlfriend rushed into the kitchen and dragged him into the yard before calling the fire department. An appalled group of trick-or-treaters learned the reason for flame-retardant costumes right there on the lawn of his grilfriend's Orillia home. Firefighters arrived within minutes, and found his entire costume reduced to ashes, right down to the white coveralls underneath. Gary was covered with second- and third-degree burns. He was conscious and kept repeating, "It's my fault," apparently aware of his own role in the creation of this spectacular Darwin Award. He was pronounced dead at Soldier's Memorial Hospital early the next morning. (March 1998, Tennessee) A teenage Knoxville boy read in an adult magazine that you could hook a cow heart up to a battery and create an organic sex toy. Thinking to improve on the original model, he hooked it up to the household current, electrocuting himself and setting fire to his house. (?1997, Italy) A man was found naked and dead with an unidentifiable mass attached to his p*nis. The coroner examined the man and, in a brilliant display of detective work, determined that he had connected the heart of a cow to electric cables, and plugged the apparatus into a normal 220V outlet. He then tried to have sex with this quickly-pumping toy, and was killed by the electricity unleashed by the object he had created. (21 March 1998, Chicago) Hyatt Regency Hotel workers discovered the remains of an ill-fated co-worker when they noticed that no laundry was reaching the bottom of the 20-story laundry chute on Saturday morning. The man, wrapped in 100 pounds of laundry, was found sliding slowly down the chute by a hotel employee who saw his feet through an opening. Jian, a 67-year-old housekeeper at the hotel, was familiar with the 2½ foot square opening the East Tower of the hotel, and it is tempting to speculate why he lost his footing and plunged into the waist-high laundry opening in the East Tower. Was he peeking into the chute to drop laundry onto the head of a co-worker below? Was he trying to encourage a recalcitrant bundle of sheets to slide further down the chute? Did his own clothing seem so dirty that he suddenly realized it needed a good cleaning? The man was pronounced dead at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Saturday. (4 July, 1998, Texas) If you fly over Houston, you will see the sky blue rectangles of countless backyard swimming pools. A Houston man joined the club, and purchased his own above ground pool on June 21, 1998. He selected the location, and the pool was installed by an independent contractor a few days later. He rated all aspects of the installation as "excellent." A few weeks later, the pool owner was swimming with his friends and enjoying an alcoholic Fourth of July haze in the humid Houston heat. In an unprecedented show of bravado, the man decided to climb onto his patio roof and dive into his pool. The man was six feet tall. His pool, typical for an above ground pool, was four feet deep. So when his head hit the bottom, his legs were still sticking two feet out of the water. The dive broke his neck. He and his family sued on the grounds of faulty installation and inappropriate location. The same installation the man had rated as "excellent" in the location he himself had selected. The lawsuit was changed to a wrongful death claim when the pool owner passed away in December. Next time you fly over Houston and see those miles of swimming pools, remember the story of this man's last miscalculated dive. (February 1998) Matthew and his friends were sliding down a Mammoth Mountain ski run on a foam pad at 3am, when he crashed into a lift tower and died. His makeshift sledge of yellow foam had been stolen from the legs of a lift tower on Stump Alley. The cushion is meant to protect skiers who hit the tower, and the tower Matthew ran into was the one from which he had created his sledge. There's a moral in there somewhere. (July 1998) A man with the unlikely ambition to jump off every river bridge in Norwich ended his athletic career with a 70-foot leap into three feet of water. Friends said the 34-year-old man had fulfilled his dream of jumping off every city bridge spanning the River Wensum. Having exhausted the bridge selection, this time he climbed to the top of a multi-story car park, looked down from the parapets and shouted an enquiry to onlookers asking how deep the water was. Then he plunged to his death in the shallow waters below. Emergency workers were unable to resuscitate the man, who was said to possess "a strange and unusual passion for jumping into rivers." 1998 Darwin Awards Runner Up (29 January 1998, Ohio) Hungry or just plain stupid? January 29, 1998, was a fateful day for Michael. He was shooting the breeze with a group of men, watching a friend clean his fish tank. Alcoholic beverages may have been present. The friend complained that one fish in particular had become a menace. It had outgrown the tank and was eating other specimens. Egged on by a dare, Michael, who had swallowed smaller fish before, volunteered to assist. He seized the 5-inch fish and attempted to swallow it. Unfortunately, it stuck in his throat. As Michael gasped futilely for breath, turned blue, and sank to his knees, his three friends realized that something was amiss. They contacted 911 and informed the dispatcher that Michael had eaten some fish, and was having trouble breathing. Paramedics were quickly dispatched. They arrived to find the fish tail still protruding from the victim's mouth. Despite their best efforts, the 23-year-old could not be resuscitated. The killer fish had claimed one last victim. Although the friends did not attempt the Heimlich maneuver or administer CPR, Akron, Ohio police said it was unlikely that murder charges would be filed. "If I dare you to jump off a bridge and you do it, you're stupid," police Maj. Mike Matulavich said. Apparently Michael was not a victim of homicide, he was just a Darwin Awards contender. 1998 Darwin Awards Winner (1998, Buenos Aires) Did he win the argument? It happened in February 1998 in a working-class Boedo neighborhood. 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. (18 May 1999, Panama City) In a similar story, a Dominican woman exacted her dying revenge on her boyfriend, who tossed her off their third-floor balcony, by dragging him down with her. Maria Mendez, 32, was killed instantly in the fall. Her boyfriend, Luis Alberto Camargo, was rushed to a nearby hospital in serious condition. According to neighbors, the confrontation occurred early Tuesday morning after Camargo, 30, discovered Mendez in a local bar. The two returned to their apartment and exchanged harsh words which culminated in the fateful plunge. |
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