List of unusual deaths

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This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness.

Revisions and sourced additions are welcome.

This article provides a list of unusual deaths – unique or extremely rare circumstances – recorded throughout history. The list also includes less rare, but still unusual, deaths of prominent people.

To be included on this list, an unusual death has to receive mention in the Wikipedia article of a person, or the death itself has to be the focus of a Wikipedia article.

Contents 1 Antiquity 2 Middle Ages 3 Renaissance 4 Age of Reason 5 Modern Age 5.1 19th century 5.2 20th century 5.3 21st century 6 See also 7 References

[edit] Antiquity

Note: Many of these stories are likely to be apocryphal (uncertain authenticity)

• 458 BC: Aeschylus, Greek playwright, was killed when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone. The tortoise survived.^[1]
• 454 BC: Inarus, Egyptian Pharaoh and leader of the rebellion in Egypt against Persian rule, was taken captive to Susa after being defeated by the satrap Megabyzus. There, after five years, he was impaled on three stakes and flayed alive.^[2]
• 270 BC: Philitas of Cos, poet and critic reportedly wasted away and died of insomnia while brooding about the Liar paradox.^[3]
• 207 BC: Chrysippus, a Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after watching his drunk donkey attempt to eat figs.^[4]
• 53 BC: Marcus Licinius Crassus was executed by having molten gold poured down his throat, following his defeat at Carrhae at the hands of the Parthians under Spahbod Surena. Some accounts claim that his head was then cut off and used as a stage prop in a play performed for the Parthian king Orodes II.^[5]
• 42 BC: Porcia Catonis, wife of Marcus Junius Brutus, killed herself by supposedly swallowing hot coals after hearing of her husband's death; however, modern historians claim that it is more likely that she poisoned herself with carbon monoxide, by burning coals in an unventilated room.^[6]
• 4 BC: Herod the Great suffered from fever, intense rashes, colon pains, foot drop, inflammation of the abdomen, a putrefaction of his genitals that produced worms, convulsions, and difficulty breathing before he finally gave up. ^[7] Similar symptoms-- abdominal pains and worms-- accompanied the death of his grandson Herod Agrippa in 44 AD, after he had imprisoned St Peter. At various times, each of these deaths has been considered divine retribution.
• 64 - 67: St Peter was executed by the Romans. According to many sources, he asked not to be crucified in the normal way, but was instead executed on an inverted cross. He said he was not worthy to be crucified the same way Jesus was. This is the only recorded instance of this type of crucifixion.
• 81: According to the Babylonian Talmud^[8], an insect flew into the Roman emperor Titus's nose and picked at his brain for seven years. He noticed that the sound of a blacksmith hammering caused the ensuing pain to abate, so he paid for blacksmiths to hammer nearby him; however, the effect wore off and the insect resumed its gnawing. When he died, they opened his skull and found the insect had grown to the size of a bird. The Talmud gives this as the cause of his death and interprets it as divine retribution for his wicked actions in destroying the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.^[9] Tales of his fate are also found in Christian sources, and the phrase "Titus's flea" has come to refer to any idea that gnaws at one's brain.
• C. 98 Saint Antipas, Bishop of Pergamum, was roasted to death in a brazen bull during the persecutions of Emperor Domitian. Saint Eustace, as well as his wife and children supposedly suffered a similar fate under Hadrian. The creator of the brazen bull, Perillos of Athens, was according to legend the first victim of the brazen bull when he presented his invention to Phalaris, Tyrant of Agrigentum.^[10]
• 258: St Lawrence was executed by being burned or 'grilled' on a large metal gridiron at Rome. Images of him often show him holding the instrument of his execution. Legend says that he was so strong-willed that instead of giving in to the Romans and releasing information about the Church, at the point of death he exclaimed "Manduca, iam coctum est." ("Eat, for it is well done.")
• 260: Roman emperor Valerian, after being defeated in battle and captured by the Persians, was used as a footstool by the King Shapur I. After a long period of punishment and humiliation, he offered Shapur a huge ransom for his release. In reply, Shapur had the unfortunate emperor skinned alive and his skin stuffed with straw or dung and preserved as a trophy. Only after the Sassanid dynasty's defeat in their last war with Rome three and a half centuries later was his skin given a cremation and burial.^[11] (A recent report from Iran mentions the restoration of a bridge supposed to have been built by Valerian and his soldiers for Shapur in return for their freedom).^[12]
• 336: Arius, the heretical priest who precipitated the Council of Nicea, passed wind and evacuated his internal organs. ^[13]
• 415: Hypatia of Alexandria, greek mathematician and philosopher, was murdered by a mob by having her skin ripped off with sharp sea-shells and what remained of her burned. (Various types of shells have been named: clams, oysters, abalones. Other sources claim tiles or pottery-shards were used.)^[14]

[edit] Middle Ages

• 1135: Henry I of England is said to have died after gorging on lampreys, his favourite food.^[15]
• 1258: Al-Musta'sim was killed during the Mongol invasion of the Abbasid Caliphate. Hulegu, not wanting to spill royal blood, had the Caliph wrapped in a rug and trampled to death by horses.^[16]
• 1277: Pope John XXI was killed in the collapse of his scientific laboratory.^[17]
• 1322: Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford was fatally speared through the anus by a pikeman hidden under the bridge during the Battle of Boroughbridge.^[18]
• 1327: Edward II of England, after being deposed and imprisoned by his Queen consort Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, was rumored to have been murdered by having a red-hot iron inserted into his anus.^[19]
• 1410: Martin I of Aragon died from a lethal combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing.^[20]
• 1478: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence reportedly was executed by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine^[21] at his own request.
• 1514: György Dózsa, székely man-at-arms and peasants' revolt leader was condemned to sit on a heated iron throne with a heated iron crown on his head and a heated sceptre in his hand (mocking at his ambition to be king). While Dózsa was suffering, he was set upon and eaten by six of his fellow rebels, who had been starved beforehand.

[edit] Renaissance

• 1556: The Mughal emperor Humayun was descending from the roof of his library after observing Venus , when he heard the mu'azaan, or call to prayer. Humayun's practice was to bow his knee when he heard the azaan, and when he did his foot caught the folds of his garment, causing him to fall down several flights. He died 3 days later of the injuries at the age of 47.^[22]
• 1559: King Henry II of France was killed during a jousting match, when his helmet's soft golden grille gave way to a broken lancetip which pierced his eye and entered his brain.
• 1599: The Burmese king Nanda Bayin reportedly "laughed to death when informed, by a visiting Italian merchant, that Venice was a free state without a king."^[23]
• 1601: Tycho Brahe, according to legend, died of complications resulting from a strained bladder at a banquet. It would have been extremely bad etiquette to leave the table before the meal was finished, so he stayed until he became fatally ill. This version of events has since been brought into question as other causes of death (murder by Johannes Kepler, suicide, and lead poisoning among others) have come to the fore.^[24]
• 1626: Francis Bacon died of pneumonia contracted while filling a chicken with ice in order to prove that freezing preserves food.^[25]
• 1660: The Scottish aristocrat Thomas Urquhart, polymath and first translator of Rabelais into English, is said to have died laughing upon hearing that Charles II had taken the throne.^[26][27]
• 1671: François Vatel, chef to Louis XIV, committed suicide because his seafood order was late and he couldn't stand the shame of a postponed meal. His body was discovered by an aide, sent to tell him of the arrival of the fish. The authenticity of this story is questionable.^[28]
• 1673: Molière, the French actor and playwright died after being seized by a violent coughing fit, whilst playing the title role in his play Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Sickness).^[29]

• 1687: Jean-Baptiste Lully, composer, died of a gangrenous abscess after piercing his foot with a staff while he was vigorously conducting a Te Deum, as it was customary at that time to conduct by banging a staff on the floor. The performance was to celebrate the king's recovery from an illness.^[30]

[edit] Age of Reason

• 1751: Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the author of L'Homme machine, a major materialist and sensualist philosopher died of over eating at a feast given in his honor. His philosophical adversaries suggested that by doing so, he had contradicted his theoretical doctrine with the effect of his practical actions.^[31]
• 1753: Professor Georg Wilhelm Richmann, of Saint Petersburg, Russia, was struck and killed by a globe of ball lightning while observing a storm.^[32]
• 1771: King of Sweden, Adolf Frederick, died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, which was topped off with 14 servings of his favorite dessert: semla served in a bowl of hot milk.^[33] He is thus remembered by Swedish schoolchildren as "the king who ate himself to death." ^[34]

[edit] Modern Age

[edit] 19th century

• 1830: William Huskisson, statesman and financier, was crushed to death by the world's first mechanically powered passenger train (Stephenson's Rocket), at its public opening.^[35]
• 1834: David Douglas, Scottish botanist, fell into a pit trap accompanied by a bull. He was gored and possibly crushed.^[36]
• 1865: Lord Francis Douglas died after falling 4000 feet, having completed the first summit of the Matterhorn.^[37]
• 1897: Salomon August Andrée, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg died in October 1897 at Kvitöya (White Island), NE of Svalbard where they had arrived after a failed attempt to reach the North Pole in a balloon. Their deaths might have been due to exhaustion but also could have been due to eating insufficiently cooked polar bear meat causing trichinosis, or carbon monoxide poisoning from the miniature kerosene stove when snow made it difficult to air out the fumes.^[38]
• 1899: Félix Faure, French president, died of a stroke while receiving oral sex in his office.^[39]

[edit] 20th century

• 1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination.^[40]
• 1912: Franz Reichelt, tailor, fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.^[41]
• 1916: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, was poisoned while dining with a political enemy, and supposedly he was given enough poison to kill three men his size. When he did not die, one assassin sneaked up behind him and shot him in the head, and while checking Grigori's pulse he was grabbed by the neck by the mystic and was strangled. He proceeded to run away, while the other assassins chased. They caught up to him after he was finally felled by three shots during the chase. The pursuers bludgeoned him, then threw him into a frozen river. When his body washed ashore, an autopsy showed the cause of death to be drowning. There is now some doubt about the credibility of this account, though.^[42]
• 1920: Ray Chapman, baseball player, was killed when he was hit in the head by a pitch.^[43]
• 1923: Martha Mansfield, an American film actress, died after sustaining severe burns on the set of the film The Warrens of Virginia after a smoker's match, tossed by a cast member, ignited her Civil War costume of hoopskirts and ruffles.^[44]
• 1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon became the first to die from the alleged King Tut's Curse after a mosquito bite on his face became seriously infected.^[45]
• 1925: Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart, a circus strongman and Jewish folklore hero, died as a result of a demonstration in which he drove a spike through five one-inch thick oak boards using only his bare hands. He accidentally pierced his knee. The spike was rusted and caused an infection which led to fatal blood poisoning. He was the subject of the Werner Herzog film, Invincible.^[46]
• 1927: J.G. Parry-Thomas, a Welsh racing driver, was decapitated by his car's drive chain which, under stress, snapped and whipped into the cockpit. He was attempting to break his own land speed record which he had set the previous year. Despite being killed in the attempt, he succeeded in setting a new record of 171 mph.^[47]
• 1927: Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of accidental strangulation and broken neck when one of the long scarves she was known for caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.^[48]
• 1928: Alexander Bogdanov, a Russian physician, died following one of his experiments, in which the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, L. I. Koldomasov, was given to him in a transfusion.^[49]
• 1932: Eben Byers, died of radiation poisoning after having consumed large quantities of a popular patent medicine containing radium.^[50]
• 1933: Michael Malloy, a homeless man, was murdered by gassing after surviving multiple poisonings, intentional exposure and being struck by a car. Malloy was murdered by five men in a plot to collect on life insurance policies they had purchased.^[51]
• 1935: Baseball player Len Koenecke was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by the crew of an aircraft he had chartered, after provoking a fight with the pilot while the plane was in the air.^[52]
• 1939: Finnish actress Sirkka Sari died when she fell down a chimney. She was at a cast party celebrating the completion of a movie, her third and last. She mistook a chimney for a balcony and fell into a heating boiler, dying instantly.^[53]
• 1941: Sherwood Anderson, writer, swallowed a toothpick at a party and then died of peritonitis.^[54]
• 1943: Critic Alexander Woollcott suffered a fatal heart attack during an on-air discussion about Adolf Hitler.^[55]
• 1944: Inventor and chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr., accidentally strangled himself with the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed of his own design.^[56]
• 1945: Scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto a sphere of plutonium while working on the Manhattan Project. This caused the plutonium to come to criticality; Daghlian died of radiation poisoning, becoming the first person to die in a criticality accident.^[57]
• 1946: Louis Slotin, chemist and physicist, died of radiation poisoning after being exposed to lethal amounts of ionized radiation. He died in a very similar way as Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., from dropping a block of material on the same sphere of plutonium by accident. The sphere of plutonium was nicknamed the Demon core^[58]
• 1947: The Collyer brothers, extreme cases of compulsive hoarders were found dead in their home in New York. The younger brother, Langley, died by falling victim to a booby trap he had set up, causing a mountain of objects, books, and newspapers to fall on him crushing him to death. His blind brother, Homer, who had depended on Langley for care, died of starvation some days later. Their bodies were recovered after massive efforts in removing many tons of debris from their home.^[59]
• 1954: Alan Turing, English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer, was found dead by his cleaner on June 8; the previous day, he had died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten beside his bed. The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, and cyanide poisoning as a cause of death was established by a post-mortem. Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability^[60]. Others suggest that Turing was reenacting a scene from "Snow White", his favourite fairy tale^[61]. Because Turing's homosexuality would have been perceived as a security risk, the possibility of assassination has also been suggested^[62].
• 1955: Margo Jones, theater director, was 43 when she was killed by the carpet in her Dallas apartment. She died July 26 from exposure to carbon tetrachloride fumes from the newly cleaned carpet.^[63]
• 1956: Nina Hamnett, artist, died from complications after falling out her apartment window and being impaled on the fence forty feet below.^[64]
• 1958: Gareth Jones, actor, collapsed and died while in make-up between scenes of a live television play, Underground, at the studios of Associated British Corporation in Manchester. Director Ted Kotcheff continued the play to its conclusion, improvising around Jones's absence.^[65]
• 1960: In the Nedelin disaster, over 100 Soviet missile technicians and officials died when a switch was turned on unintentionally igniting the rocket, including Red Army Marshal Nedelin who was seated in a deck chair just 40 meters away overseeing launch preparations. The events were filmed by automatic cameras.
• 1961: On March 23, Soviet cosmonaut trainee Valentin Bondarenko died from shock after suffering third-degree burns over much of his body, due to a flash fire in the pure oxygen environment of a training simulator. This incident was not revealed outside of the Soviet Union until the 1980s.^[66]
• 1963: On June 11, Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, sat down in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon, covered himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire burning himself to death. Đức was protesting President Ngô Đình Diệm's administration for oppressing the Buddhist religion.^[67]
• 1967: In an incident similar to the death of Bondarenko, a flash fire began in the pure oxygen environment during a training exercise inside the unlaunched Apollo 1 spacecraft, killing Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee. The door to the capsule was unable to be opened during the fire because of its particular design. Had the Soviet Union revealed the earlier death of Valentin Bondarenko, this incident could likely have been avoided.^[68]
• 1967: Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during a space mission after the parachute of his capsule failed to deploy following re-entry.^[69]
• 1971: Jerome Irving Rodale, an American pioneer of organic farming, died of a heart attack while being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show. According to urban legend, when he appeared to fall asleep, Cavett quipped "Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?"^[70]. Cavett says this is incorrect; the initial reaction to Rodale was fellow guest Pete Hamill noticing something was wrong, and saying in a low voice to Cavett, "This looks bad."^[71] The show was never broadcast.
• 1972: Leslie Harvey, guitarist of Stone the Crows was electrocuted on stage by a live microphone.^[72]
• 1973: Bruce Lee, a martial arts actor, is thought to have died by a severe allergic reaction to Equagesic. His brain had swollen about 13%. His autopsy was written as "death by misadventure."^[73]
• 1974: Christine Chubbuck, an American television news reporter, committed suicide during a live broadcast on July 15. At 9:38 AM, 8 minutes into her talk show, on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, she drew out a revolver and shot herself in the head.^[74]
• 1975: Physicist and businessman Kip Siegel died of a stroke while testifying before a US Congressional subcommittee.^[75]
• 1975: Japanese kabuki actor Bandō Mitsugorō VIII died of severe poisoning when he ate four fugu livers (also known as pufferfish). The liver is considered one of the most (if not most) poisonous part of the fish, but Mitsugorō claimed to be immune to the poison. The fugu chef felt he could not refuse Mitsugorō and lost his license as a result.^[76]
• 1976: Keith Relf, former singer for British rhythm and blues band The Yardbirds, died while practicing his electric guitar—he was electrocuted because the guitar was not properly grounded.^[77]
• 1977: Tom Pryce, a Formula One driver, and a 19-year-old track marshal Jansen Van Vuuren both died at the 1977 South African Grand Prix after Van Vuuren ran across the track beyond a blind brow to attend to another car which had caught fire and was struck by Pryce's car at approximately 170mph. Pryce was struck in the face by the marshal's fire extinguisher and was killed instantly.^[78]
• 1978: Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was assassinated by poisoning in London by an unknown assailant who jabbed him in the calf with a specially modified umbrella that fired a metal pellet with a small cavity full of ricin poison.
• 1978: Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory Parker worked at accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. She is believed to be the last smallpox fatality in history.^[79]
• 1978: Claude François, a French pop singer, was electrocuted when he tried to change a light bulb whilst standing in his bathtub which was full of water at the time.^[80]
• 1978: Kurt Goedel, the Austrian/American mathematician died of starvation when his wife was hospitalized. Goedel suffered from extreme paranoia and refused to eat food prepared by anyone else. He was 65 pounds when he died. His death certificate reported that he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978.^[81]
• 1979: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Co. plant, was the first known man to be killed by a robot.^[82]
• 1981: Carl McCunn, in March 1981, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.^[83]
• 1981: Boris Sagal, a motion picture-director, died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III when he walked into the tail-rotor blade of a helicopter and was decapitated.
• 1982: Vic Morrow, actor, was decapitated by a helicopter blade during filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, along with two child actors, Myca Dinh Le (decapitated) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (crushed).^[84]
• 1982: Vladimir Smirnov, an Olympic champion fencer, died of brain damage nine days after his opponent's foil snapped during a match, penetrated his mask, pierced his eyeball and entered his brain.
• 1983: Sergei Chalibashvili, a professional diver, died after a diving accident during World University Games. When he attempted a three-and-a-half reverse somersault in the tuck position, he smashed his head on the board and was knocked unconscious. He died after being in a coma for a week.
• 1983: Author Tennessee Williams died at the age of 71 after he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. Williams' lack of gag response may have been due to drugs and alcohol effects.
• 1984: Jon-Erik Hexum, an American television actor, died after he shot himself in the head with a prop gun during a break in filming. Hexum apparently did not realize that blanks use paper or plastic wadding to seal gun powder into the shell, and that this wadding is propelled out of the barrel of the gun with enough force to cause severe injury or death if the weapon is fired at point-blank range.
• 1986: While on the air giving a traffic report, the helicopter that Jane Dornacker was riding in stalled and crashed into the Hudson River, killing her. This was the second helicopter crash she had been in that year.
• 1987: Budd Dwyer, a Republican politician, committed suicide during a televised press conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Facing a potential 55-year jail sentence for alleged involvement in a conspiracy, Dwyer shot himself in the mouth with a revolver.
• 1992: Christopher McCandless died of starvation near Denali National Park after a few months trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness.
• 1993: Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, was shot and killed by Michael Massee using a prop .44 Magnum gun while filming the movie The Crow. A cartridge with only a primer and a bullet was fired in the pistol prior to the scene Brandon was in; this caused a squib load, in which the primer provided enough force to push the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel of the revolver, where it became stuck. The malfunction went unnoticed by the crew, and the same gun was used again later to shoot the death scene, having been re-loaded with blanks. However, the squib load was still lodged in the barrel, and was propelled by the blank cartridge's explosion out of the barrel and into Lee's body. It was not instantly recognized by the crew or other actors; they believed he was still acting.
• 1993: Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was "unbreakable."
• 1993: Michael A. Shingledecker Jr. was killed almost instantly when he and a friend were struck by a pickup truck while lying flat on the yellow dividing line of a two-lane highway in Polk, Pennsylvania. They were copying a daredevil stunt from a movie The Program. Marco Birkhimer died of a similar accident while performing the same stunt in Route 206 of Bordentown, New Jersey. ^[85]

• 1996: Sharon Lopatka, an internet entrepreneur from Maryland allegedly solicited a man via the Internet to torture and kill her for the purpose of sexual gratification. Her killer, Robert Fredrick Glass, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the homicide.
• 1998: Tom and Eileen Lonergan were stranded while scuba diving with a group of divers off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The group's boat accidentally abandoned them due to an incorrect head count taken by the dive boat crew. Their bodies were never recovered. The incident is depicted in the film Open Water and an episode of 20/20.^[86]
• 1998: In Congo a soccer game ended when every player on the visiting team was struck by a fork bolt of lightning, killing them all instantly.^[87]
• 1999: Owen Hart, a professional wrestler for WWE died during a Pay-Per-View event when performing a stunt. It was planned to have Owen come down from the rafters of the Kemper Arena on a safety harness tied to a rope to make his ring entrance. The safety latch was released and Owen dropped 78 feet, bouncing chest-first off the top rope resulting in a severed aorta, which caused his lungs to fill with blood.^[88]
• 2000: Jonathan Burton stormed the cockpit door of a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City. The 19-year-old was subdued by eight other passengers with such force that he died of asphyxiation.^[89]

[edit] 21st century

• 2001: Bernd-Jürgen Brandes from Germany was stabbed repeatedly and then partly eaten by Armin Meiwes (who was later called the Cannibal of Rothenburg). Brandes had answered an internet advertisement by Meiwes looking for someone for this purpose. Brandes explicitly stated in his will that he wished to be killed and eaten.^[90]
• 2002: Brittanie Cecil, an American 13-year-old hockey fan, died two days after being struck in the head by a hockey puck at a game between the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Calgary Flames at Nationwide Arena. ^[91]
• 2003: Brian Douglas Wells, a pizza delivery man in Erie, Pennsylvania, was killed by a time bomb which was fastened around his neck. He was apprehended by the police after robbing a bank, and claimed he had been forced to do it by three people who had put the bomb around his neck and would kill him if he refused. The bomb later exploded, killing him. In 2007, police alleged Wells was involved in the robbery plot along with two other conspirators.^[92]
• 2003: Brandon Vedas died of a drug overdose while engaged in an Internet chat, as shown on his webcam.^[93]
• 2003: Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist who had lived in the wilderness among bears for thirteen summers in a remote region in Alaska, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, were killed and partially consumed by a bear. An audio recording was captured on a video camera (the lens-cap was in place during the incident), but the tape has never been released to the public. Werner Herzog's documentary film, Grizzly Man, discusses Treadwell and his death.^[94]
• 2005: Kenneth Pinyan of Enumclaw, Washington died of acute peritonitis after submitting to anal intercourse with a stallion. Pinyan had done this before, and he delayed his visit to the hospital for several hours out of reluctance for official cognizance. The case led to the criminalization of bestiality in Washington.^[95] His story was recounted in the 2007 documentary film Zoo.
• 2005: 28-year-old South Korean, Lee Seung Seop, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing StarCraft for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet cafe.^[96]
• 2006: Steve Irwin, a television personality and naturalist known as The Crocodile Hunter, died when his heart was impaled by a short-tail stingray barb while filming a documentary entitled "Ocean's Deadliest" in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef. ^[97]
• 2006: Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian State security service, and later a Russian dissident and writer, suddenly fell ill and was hospitalized. He died three weeks later, becoming the first known victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome.
• 2007: Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman from Sacramento, died of water intoxication while trying to win a Wii console in a KDND 107.9 "The End" radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating.^[98][99]
• 2007: Kevin Whitrick, a 42-year-old man committed suicide by hanging himself live on a webcam during an internet chat session.^[100]
• 2007: Surinder Singh Bajwa, the Deputy Mayor of Delhi, India, was kicked by a Rhesus Macaque monkey at his home and fell from a first floor balcony, suffering serious head injuries. He later died from his injuries.^[101]
• 2008: Abigail Taylor, 6, died nine months after her organs were partially sucked out by a swimming pool drain. She had several organs replaced in surgery but died later due to the incident. ^[102]

[edit] See also

• Toilet-related injury
• List of inventors killed by their own inventions
• Darwin Awards
• Multiple gunshot suicide
• List of people who died onstage

[edit] References