List of unusual deaths

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The Unusual Death List describes one-off or very rare circumstances of death that have occurred throughout history that have been identified as unusual by multiple sources. The listing is done chronologically. Some of the deaths are mythological in origin or not supported by contemporary reports.

Antiquity

Illustration of the death of Aeschylus in the Florentine illustrated chronicle by Maso Finiguerra (15th century)
  • approx. 620 BC Chr .: Drakon , Athenian law reformer, suffocated under a mountain of coats and hats that had been thrown at him by grateful citizens in a theater on Aegina .
  • 564 BC Chr .: Arrhichion of Phigalia , Greek pankratiast , died at the Olympic Games . During a fight he was almost defeated because his head was in the leg scissors of his opponent. With the last of his strength, he broke his opponent's toes. The latter then gave up, but at the same moment Arrhichion suffocated, who was posthumously declared the victor.
  • 455 BC Chr .: Aeschylus , the great Greek tragedy poet, was killed according to Valerius Maximus by a turtle that had been dropped by a bird of prey. The bird allegedly mistook Aeschylus' head for a rock and used it to break open the turtle shell. Pliny the Elder adds in his Naturalis Historiæ that Aeschylus was outside because a prophecy had warned him about falling objects.
  • 270 BC Chr .: Philetas , a Greek scholar, so occupied himself with his study of the art of debate, according to a report by Athenaios , that he starved to death. The British philologist Alan Cameron suspects that Philetas suffered from an debilitating disease, which his contemporaries at the time attributed to his pedantry .
  • 210 BC BC: Qin Shihuangdi , the first emperor of China , died from taking mercury pills, believing that they would give him immortality . Chancellor Li Si and head eunuch Zhao Gao hushed up the emperor's death for two months in order to influence the succession to the throne. They whitewashed the smell of decay with rotten and dried fish. Qin Shihuangdi was finally buried in a huge mausoleum , which has not yet been fully uncovered. All those concubines who had not given birth to him were also walled up in it. The grave goods included the famous terracotta army.
  • 206 BC Chr .: According to ancient portrayals, the philosopher Chrysippus von Soloi died of a fit of laughter. The stoic saw a donkey eating its figs and told a slave to give the donkey wine to wash the figs down with. He is said to have found this so funny that he literally laughed himself to death about it.
  • AD 258: The deacon Laurentius of Rome was grilled alive on a large grate. This happened in the course of the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Valerian . According to the poet Prudentius , Laurentius is said to have joked with the torturers: “Let me turn! On the one hand, I'm through now! ”. The saint is represented with his torture tool, the rust; today he is the patron saint of cooks and firefighters.
  • AD 336: Arius , presbyter of Alexandria , allegedly died of acute diarrhea followed by severe bleeding and excretion of his viscera while walking across the Imperial Forum in Constantinople . He was probably poisoned.

  • Qin Shihuangdi in a historicizing illustration from around 1850

  • Martyrdom of St. Lawrence painted by Titian

  • Portrait of Arius

middle Ages

An illustration of Charles II, called "the bad one"
  • 762: According to tradition, Li Bai , Chinese poet and courtier , drowned while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon on a river when he was drunk.
  • 1063: Bela I , King of Hungary, died when his wooden throne collapsed under him.
  • 1131: Philip of France , king of France , died at the age of 15 while riding through Paris. His horse shied away from a pig that came running out of a dung heap. Philipp was thrown from the saddle and succumbed to his injuries the following day.
  • 1184: About 60 people were killed when the Erfurt latrine fell - including Count Gozmar III. von Ziegenhain , Count Friedrich I. von Abenberg , Burgrave Friedrich I. von Kirchberg , Count Heinrich von Schwarzburg , Burgrave Burchard von der Wartburg and Beringer I. von Meldingen  - as on the occasion of a court day of King Heinrich VI. In Erfurt the upper floor of the Dompropstei of the Marienstift collapsed under the weight of the assembled crowd and tore most of those present down. The floor of the next floor also gave way under the pressure and caused those falling to fall into the cesspool below. Those who did not drown or suffocate were killed or injured by falling beams and stones.
  • 1190: Dedo III. , Margrave of Lusatia, called the Feiste or also the Fette , died of the consequences of an operation in which he had fat cut out of his body to protect Emperor Heinrich VI. to be able to accompany on a campaign.
  • 1258: Al-Musta'sim bi-'llah , the last Abbasid caliph of Baghdad , was executed by his Mongol kidnappers by rolling him into a carpet and trampling him by horses.
  • 1327: Edward II , King of England and Wales. He was arrested and imprisoned by his wife, Isabelle de France and her lover, Roger Mortimer . It was rumored that he was executed by inserting red- hot iron rectally through a horn . It burned from the inside out, but was externally unharmed. However, there is no scientific evidence of the circumstances of Edward II's death. It is believed that this story was fabricated for propaganda purposes.
  • 1387: Charles II , King of Navarre , had himself wrapped in towels soaked with brandy every evening to treat an illness . One evening a servant accidentally came across the bandages with a torch, and they immediately caught fire. Charles II succumbed to the severe burns.
  • 1410: Martin I , King of Aragón , died of a fit of laughter associated with digestive disorders.
  • 1478: When sentenced to death George Plantagenet , Duke of Clarence , was about to choose his method of execution, he chose to be drowned in a barrel of Malvasia wine . His request was granted.

Renaissance

The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, painted by Eduard Ender
  • 1518: The dance madness of 1518 in Strasbourg began with a single woman who danced uncontrollably for over a month. Over time, more and more people joined her until the end of 400 people who fell ill with the dance fever. Dozens of them died of heat stroke and exhaustion. The exact circumstances of this incident are still unclear.
  • 1556: Pietro Aretino , an Italian writer and poet, according to legend, suffocated while laughing.
  • 1567: Hans Staininger , the governor of Braunau , broke his neck when he tripped over his own beard. Hans Staininger kept the beard, which was almost five feet long, usually rolled up in his breast pocket.
  • 1601: Tycho Brahe was invited to a banquet for the emperor. Court etiquette forbade guests to rise from the table in front of the emperor. Therefore, a urinary retention in Tycho Brahe led to a rupture of the bladder, of which he died ten days later.
  • 1660: Thomas Urquhart , a Scottish poet and translator, allegedly died of a laughing fit after hearing of Charles II coming to power .
  • 1673: Molière , actor, theater director and playwright of French classical music, suffered a hemorrhage during a performance of his comedy The Imaginary Ill , in which he played the role of the hypochondriac protagonist. When Molière collapsed on stage, the audience initially believed that it was an interlude within the comedy. The French comedian died a little later in his apartment in Paris.
  • 1685: Thomas Otway , English playwright, was almost starving, so begged a guinea and bought a piece of bread from it, on which he suffocated.
  • 1687: Jean-Baptiste Lully , chief court musician of Louis XIV , died of gangrene after he had rammed his own (at that time still a man-high) baton into his foot.

18th century

  • 1762: Prince Sado , Crown Prince of Korea , was found unworthy of succession due to his eccentric behavior. King Yeongjo had him locked up in a rice box, in which he died of thirst.
  • 1771: Adolf Friedrich, King of Sweden , died on February 12, 1771 of a stroke caused by digestive problems. His last meal was lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring, champagne and, at the end, 14 servings of his favorite dessert , Hetvägg , served in hot milk. Swedish school children therefore know him as the king who ate himself to death.
  • 1783: The American independence fighter James Otis Jr. is said to have mentioned many times to friends and relatives that he would like to die of a lightning strike. His wish came true on May 23, 1783, when lightning struck the house of a friend whose entrance was Otis.

19th century

  • 1816: US politician Governor Morris died of internal injuries while inserting a piece of whale bone into his urethra to loosen a blockage.
  • 1834: The Scottish botanist David Douglas fell into a trap in Hawaii where a wild bull was. This trampled him to death.
  • 1837: The English inventor Robert Cocking built one of the first parachute constructions in history. On the very first test flight with the balloon, he was so sure of his cause that he jumped from an altitude of 1,500 m. He fell fatally because, although he had correctly included his own weight in the calculations, he did not take into account the weight of the parachute (after all, over 100 kg).
  • 1841: On March 4, 1841, William Henry Harrison spoke for over two hours as part of his inaugural speech as US President and contracted pneumonia from which he died a few weeks later, making his term in office the shortest in the history of the United States has been.
  • 1867: Mathilde von Österreich-Teschen died of burns after her dress was lit by a cigarette, which she hid from her father in her dress, as he had strictly forbidden her to smoke. The muslin dress was impregnated with glycerine to give it more fullness.
  • 1871: Clement Vallandigham , an Ohio attorney and politician, died after accidentally shooting himself. In preparation for a murder trial in which he was supposed to defend the accused, he demonstrated to another lawyer how the alleged murder victim could have shot himself. To do this, he took a weapon that he mistakenly believed to be unloaded. Based on this index, the defendant was later acquitted.
  • 1884: Allan Pinkerton , a Scottish-American detective and founder of the Pinkerton Agency , believed to be the first US private detective agency , died of an infection; he bit his tongue when he stumbled on a sidewalk in Chicago. He did not take the injury seriously, but the wound became infected and he developed gangrene, from which he eventually died.

20th century

1910s

Franz Reichelt
  • 1912: On February 4, 1912, the Austrian tailor and parachute designer Franz Reichelt jumped from the Eiffel Tower in front of reporters and onlookers from a height of 57 m and hit the ground almost unchecked in front of the camera after a fall of four seconds. Reichelt was dead on the spot, attempts at resuscitation were unsuccessful. He wanted to test his parachute for the first time and had previously received a declaration of consent from the police prefecture, provided that he did not carry out the test himself but with a dummy.
  • 1919: During the molasses catastrophe in Boston on January 15, 1919, a tank filled with molasses burst, whereupon its contents poured over downtown Boston in a gush of up to nine meters. 21 people lost their lives.

1920s

Isadora Duncan
  • 1920: American baseball player Ray "Chappie" Chapman died twelve hours after being hit in the temple by a baseball. The pitcher was Carl Mays . To date, Chapman is the only major league player killed by a hit by pitch .
  • 1920: Dan Andersson , a Swedish poet, died of cyanide poisoning at the Hellman Hotel in Stockholm . Before his arrival, the hotel staff had sprayed hydrogen cyanide ( hydrogen cyanide ) in his room to rid it of bed bugs . After that, however, the room was not adequately ventilated. In addition to Andersson, the insurance inspector Elliot Eriksson died of the same poisoning.
  • 1920: Alexander , King of Greece, was walking through the National Garden in Athens when his sheepdog was attacked by a Barbary macaque . While trying to defend the dog, Alexander was bitten by both animals. He suffered blood poisoning from the infected bite wounds , which ended fatally for him three weeks later.
  • 1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon , was present at the opening of Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb KV62 by Howard Carter . Four months later, Herbert was stung by a mosquito in the cheek. The sting was infected by a cut made while shaving, which resulted in blood poisoning and ultimately fatal pneumonia. Already at the time of the opening of the tomb the idea of ​​a curse by the Pharaoh , to which George Herbert should also have fallen victim, was spreading ; scientifically, however, the curse could not be proven.
  • 1925: The artist and wrestler Siegmund Breitbart wanted to drive a nail through five 25 mm thick boards with his bare hand during a performance. He drove this nail into his knee, which resulted in blood poisoning. Despite ten operations and the amputation of both legs, he died eight weeks later as a result of the infection.
  • 1926: 16-year-old Phillip McClean from Queensland , Australia is the first known person to be killed by a cassowary . When the boy discovered the bird on the family's property, he and his brother wanted to kill the animal with clubs. The cassowary knocked him to the ground and kicked him, ripping open McClean's carotid artery with his claws . Although the boy was able to run away, he collapsed shortly afterwards and died of blood loss .
  • 1926: Harry Houdini , the well-known escape artist, claimed to be able to survive every punch in the abdomen by tensing his abdominal muscles unscathed. On October 22, 1926, he was punched in the stomach by student Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead at his own request. However, Houdini had previously suffered from abdominal pain, which was made worse by the blow from Whitehead. A few days later, Houdini died of a ruptured appendix with the resulting peritonitis .
  • 1927: Isadora Duncan , an American dancer, was about to go for a walk in an open Amilcar in Nice when her scarf got caught in the wheel spokes before leaving. The jerk when starting up broke her neck .

1930s

  • 1932: Eben Byers , an American golfer and industrialist, died of cancer from a radium overdose . To treat an arm injury, a doctor recommended the drug Radithor , which consisted of radium dissolved in water. Byers reportedly drank nearly 1,400 bottles of Radithor over a three-year period, which resulted in loss of his lower jaw and brain damage, among other things.
  • 1933: Michael Malloy, aka Mike the Durable and Iron Mike , was a homeless Irish migrant worker from County Donegal who lived in New York during the 1920s and 1930s . The former firefighter gained notoriety by surviving nine assassinations carried out on him by five acquaintances (later in the headlines as "Murder Trust") for the purpose of insurance fraud . They wanted to get the money from the life insurance policies they had taken out on Malloy. The tenth murder attempt was successful finally, Malloy died of carbon monoxide poisoning by town gas .
  • 1936: A British man named John Russell Makinson was used as a soldier in the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915 . During the fighting, an enemy bullet hit him in the heart. Makinson survived, but the bullet remained in his body. When he and his wife went on a sea voyage to the former theater of war 21 years later , the foreign body moved in his heart, from which he finally died.
  • 1938: Ödön von Horváth was an Austro-Hungarian writer of Hungarian nationality who wrote in German. A fortune teller prophesied Horváth that in the first days of June 1938 he would be on a journey with "the most important event of his life". Then the superstitious Horváth u. a. no more elevators. On the day of his death, he met the German-American director Robert Siodmak. The Siodmaks' offer to take him back to the hotel by car was turned down on the grounds that it was too dangerous. Then, on his way home, he was struck by a falling branch.

1940s

Sherwood Anderson
  • 1941: The American writer Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis caused by a toothpick swallowed.
  • 1944: The chemist and inventor Thomas Midgley fell ill with polio at the age of 51 , which severely disabled him. He designed a pulley system that would lift him out of bed and into a wheelchair. Midgley died after becoming tangled and strangled in the ropes of the device at the age of 55.
  • 1945: Harry Daghlian , an American physicist, accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide cuboid on a 6.2 kg plutonium core while working on the Manhattan Project . The system promptly became supercritical and Daghlian was exposed to an estimated 5.1 Sievert radiation exposure. Three weeks later he died of radiation sickness , making him the first victim of a nuclear accident .
  • 1946: Louis Slotin , Canadian physicist and chemist, also died of radiation sickness after experimenting on the same plutonium nucleus that killed Harry Daghlian. For demonstration purposes, Slotin enclosed the core with two beryllium half-shells, which, contrary to the regulations, were simply held apart by a screwdriver. When that screwdriver accidentally slipped and the shells touched, the arrangement became overly critical and Slotin received the fatal radiation dose of 21 Sievert, to which he succumbed after just nine days. After these two incidents, the test core was given the nickname Demon Core ("demon core").
  • 1948: On a United Airlines passenger flight, a warning signal sounded indicating a fire in the cargo compartment. The pilots then activated the fire extinguishing system, which pumped carbon dioxide into the hold, but forgot to follow the procedures necessary for this step. A valve remained open and the gas flowed into the cockpit, so that the crew suffocated and the machine crashed. It later emerged that the warning tone was a false alarm (see also United Air Lines flight 624 ) .

1950s

  • 1953: Ronald Maddison, a 20-year-old soldier in the Royal Air Force, had 20 drops of the chemical warfare agent sarin drizzled on him for 15 shillings and died despite immediate emergency medical care.
  • 1959: Nine ski tourers died in the night of February 1 to February 2, 1959 in the northern Urals in the so-called accident at the Djatlow Pass .

1960s

Soviet postage stamp in honor of Vladimir Komarov, the first person to die during a space mission.
  • 1960: In the nedelin catastrophe on the Baikonur died military 92-200 Soviet rocket engineers and members, perhaps because a switch has been operated, the second stage of an intercontinental missile fired. This tore up the tanks of the first stage below and triggered an explosion. Among the victims was the chief artillery marshal , Mitrofan Nedelin , who sat on a chair eight meters from the missile. All that remained of him were his Order of Hero of the Soviet Union and an epaulette of his uniform.
  • 1960: Asanuma Inejirō , the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Japan , was stabbed to death with a Japanese short sword ( wakizashi ) during a campaign speech on television . The assassin was 17-year-old right-wing extremist, ultra-national Otoya Yamaguchi .
  • 1960: British Formula 1 driver Alan Stacey had an accident at the wheel of his Lotus 18 at the Belgian Grand Prix in Spa when a bird hit the visor of his helmet and Stacey lost control of the car.
  • 1961: Valentin Wassiljewitsch Bondarenko , a Soviet aspirant cosmonaut , died in a pressurized cabin during a training session. A fire broke out in the chamber with a pure oxygen atmosphere, which expanded explosively and caused third-degree burns to 90 percent of Bondarenko's body. Due to the large pressure difference, the cabin doors could not be opened quickly enough to save him.
  • 1966: The US skydiver Nick Piantanida died four months after attempting the world record for the highest parachute jump to break the effects of a temporary lack of oxygen. During the ascent, his oxygen mask opened at a height of 17 kilometers for unknown reasons (the planned final height was 36 kilometers); the jump could therefore no longer take place. Due to the insufficient supply of the brain, Piantanida fell into a coma from which he did not wake up until his death.
  • 1967: NASA astronauts Gus Grissom , Edward Higgins White and Roger B. Chaffee burned to death in the Apollo 1 capsule during an exercise . After a short circuit, the fire spread rapidly in the capsule's oxygen atmosphere. As with Valentin Wassiljewitsch Bondarenko in 1961, the hatches of the cabin could not be opened because of the overpressure, so that there was no possibility of rescue.
  • 1967: The cosmonaut Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov was the first person to die during a space mission. When he re-entered the earth's atmosphere, neither the braking nor the emergency parachute of his Soyuz-1 capsule opened , and Komarov hit the surface of the earth without braking at 140 km / h and died.

1970s

Kurt Gödel
  • 1971: The cosmonauts Georgi Dobrowolski , Wladislaw Wolkow and Wiktor Pazajew died from a leaking valve in their Soyuz-11 spacecraft shortly before they re-entered the earth's atmosphere. The death of the three cosmonauts was only noticed when the rescue team on the ground opened the capsule hatches, as the landing had been carried out fully automatically. Dobrowolski, Wolkow and Pazajew are so far the only known people who died outside the earth's atmosphere.
  • 1974: Christine Chubbuck , an American news anchor, committed suicide in front of the camera on July 15, 1974. Eight minutes after her program Suncoast Digest began on WXLT-TV, she shot herself in the head with a .38 caliber revolver. She died soon after in Sarasota , Florida Hospital .
  • 1977: British racing driver Tom Pryce died at the South African Grand Prix in Kyalami when he was hit in the face by a fire extinguisher from a marshals. The marshal Frederik Jansen Van Vuuren had just crossed the runway to extinguish Pryce's team-mate Renzo Zorzi’s vehicle, which had caught fire. The scene of the accident was behind a hilltop, so Van Vuuren could not be seen by the pilots on the route. Pryce had no way of reacting and caught Van Vuuren at a speed of 280 km / h. Both men died instantly.
  • 1978: Georgi Markov , a Bulgarian writer and dissident , was the victim of a so-called umbrella attack in London : the assassin apparently accidentally injured Markov with the tip of a prepared umbrella. A small, impregnated metal ball filled with 40 micrograms of highly toxic ricin was stabbed into his calf . Markov died of heart failure three days after the attack.
  • 1978: British medical photographer Janet Parker died of smallpox ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild. A researcher accidentally released some of the pathogens into the air of the building where Parker worked in a darkroom while experimenting . She became infected and is the last known person to die from smallpox.
  • 1978: The Austrian-American mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel starved to death when his wife was hospitalized for six months because of a stroke . Godel was extremely paranoid and refused all meals that were not prepared by his wife.
  • 1978: A Boeing 737-200 of the Indian Airlines with 105 people aboard was at early hours on approach to the airport Hyderabad . Shortly before the aircraft touched down on the runway, the pilots noticed a person who was walking across the center lane of the runway with his back to the approaching aircraft. The pilots could no longer take evasive maneuvers, the machine caught and killed the pedestrian.
  • 1979: Robert Williams, a Ford worker , was the first known person to be killed by a robot after being hit in the head by an industrial robot's arm.

1980s

  • 1980: In a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar of Saudia all died 301 passengers after a fire, because the pilots did not immediately brought the plane to a successful emergency landing to a halt and made a serious error in the evacuation. Because the accident could actually have been survived if the rescue workers had known how to open the doors from the outside. (see Saudia flight 163 ).
A Lockheed L-100 Hercules operated by Transamerica Airlines
  • 1980: A parachutist type was in California in the air by a large transport aircraft Lockheed L-100 Hercules of Trans International Airlines recorded, which was located on the landing approach. Air traffic control accused the skydiver of the accident of failing to report that he wanted to jump in the area.
  • 1981: American director Boris Sagal died while filming the miniseries World War III . He ran into the tail rotor of a helicopter and was almost completely beheaded in the process.
  • 1982: Actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le (7) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (6) died while filming the film Eerie Shadow Lights . The three actors were supposed to cross an artificial river while being chased by a helicopter. The helicopter was caught in a pyrotechnic explosion and fell on the performers, with Morrow and Myca Dinh Le being beheaded by the rotor blades and Renee Shin-Yi Chen being pierced by one of the runners. All three were killed instantly, the helicopter crew was only slightly injured.
  • 1982: On a cargo flight, the first officer had a Swearingen SA227-AC Metro III of Pioneer Airlines (N30093) during the approach to Pueblo , Colorado , vomit. When trying to help his colleague to prevent suffocation through aspiration of stomach contents , the captain did not pay attention to the flight altitude, so that the machine flew off-road . Both pilots, the only occupants of the machine, were killed (see also flight accident involving a Swearingen Metro operated by Pioneer Airlines ) .
  • 1982: A fire developed as a passenger on a scheduled flight in the People's Republic of China fell into an inaccessible gap between the seat rail and the cabin wall of an Ilyushin Il-18 . The aircraft was able to land at the destination airport, but 25 passengers died before the machine could be completely evacuated (see also CAAC flight 2311 ) .
Tennessee Williams
  • 1983: The American writer Tennessee Williams suffocated on a cap for eye drops in the Hotel Elysée in New York . He was probably holding the cap in his mouth while he sat back and used the eye drops.
  • 1983: Four divers and one assistant died in a decompression stop on the Byford Dolphin when there was an explosive drop in chamber pressure from nine to one atmosphere in a split second . One of the divers who was exposed to the highest pressure gradient exploded due to the abrupt expansion of the body's internal gases. All of his limbs and thoracic and abdominal organs, including the thoracic spine, shot out of the body and were hurled through the 60 cm hatch to the pressure chamber.
  • 1984: The German food technician Günther Stoll was found naked and seriously injured in his car near Hagen at 3 a.m. In the hours before that, something mysterious had already happened: He had written “YOGTZE” on a piece of paper, shouted to his wife “Now I see a light!” And said to another woman that something terrible would happen the following night. The case became known in the Federal Republic of Germany as the YOGTZE case .
  • 1986: Over 1,700 people died at Lake Nyos in Cameroon when the lake suddenly released 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide (a so-called "limnic eruption"). The CO 2 flowed into two nearby valleys, killing people and animals up to 25 km away. The cause of the outgassing is still unknown. As early as 1984, 37 people were killed in a similar incident at Lake Manoun (also Cameroon).
  • 1987: The politician and head of the Pennsylvania Treasury Department Robert Budd Dwyer was the second person to shoot himself in front of the camera at a press conference he called himself.
  • 1987: Garbage collectors broke into a radiology practice in the Brazilian city ​​of Goiânia and stole radiation therapy equipment . They sold the device to scrap dealer Devair Alves Ferreira, who broke it open and was so fascinated by the cesium chloride , which glowed blue in the dark , that he distributed the powder among family members and friends. Four people died of radiation sickness , 249 people were seriously contaminated and had to be quarantined (see: Goiânia accident ).
  • 1989: The psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and aggression researcher Friedrich Hacker died in front of the camera during a discussion broadcast live by ZDF.

1990s

  • 1993: Actor Brandon Lee died in an accident while filming The Crow . He was hit by part of a dummy pistol bullet that had jammed in the barrel unnoticed. When actor Michael Massee was shot , it was thrown out by the explosion pressure of the blank cartridges and hit him fatally.
  • 1993: A McDonnell Douglas MD-82 of China Northern Airlines hit several kilometers from the destination airport, killing 12 passengers. The pilots entered an incorrect rate of descent and did not understand the subsequent warnings from the on-board computer about a collision with the ground ( Glideslope! - Too low terrain! - Pull up! ) Due to poor knowledge of English (see: China Northern Airlines flight 6901 ).
  • 1993: The 39-year-old attorney Garry Hoy wanted to demonstrate to a group of students on July 3, 1993 the unbreakability of the glass windows of the Toronto Dominion Center . He threw himself against the window, which he did not for the first time, but tragically this time the window peeled off the wall and Garry Hoy fell 24 floors to his death.
  • 1994: The flight captain of Aeroflot , Jaroslaw Kudrinski, invited his two children into the cockpit of the Airbus A310-300 during a passenger flight from Moscow to Hong Kong and first let his 12-year-old daughter Jana and then his 15-year-old son Eldar take a seat in the pilot's seat and hold the control horn while the autopilot is on. The son accidentally activated an autopilot function that even experienced pilots were not familiar with at the time. The plane got into an abnormal flight position and crashed, killing 75 people (see: Aeroflot flight 593 ).
  • 1997: Karen Wetterhahn , a chemistry professor at Dartmouth College , died of mercury poisoning ten months after a few drops of dimethylmercury landed on her protective gloves. Although the scientist had taken all precautions in handling the chemical, the gloves and skin penetrated within seconds. After this incident, the standard use of dimethylmercury in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy was discontinued and the safety data sheets were updated accordingly.
  • 1997: Azerbaijani soldiers returning from a target practice shot machine guns at traffic signs for entertainment. When a Yak-40 of Azerbaijan Airlines on a test flight flew past the soldiers, misses hit the machine, which then crashed; all seven people on board were killed (see: Aircraft accident at Gəncə ).
  • 1999: Independently of each other, two passengers of a McDonnell Douglas MD-90 of the Taiwanese Uni Air brought items on board that should turn out to be dangerous goods. One passenger had two bottles of bleach sealed with silicone and filled with gasoline, another a motorcycle battery. In the stowage compartments for hand luggage, the bleach bottles leaked, whereupon an oxygen-gasoline mixture developed. When the plane touched down at Hualien Airport , there was a short circuit in the motorcycle battery, which ignited the gasoline fumes. One person was killed in the incident (see: Uni-Air flight 873 ).

21st century

2000s

  • 2001: Bernd Brandes was voluntarily killed by Armin Meiwes in Rotenburg in order to be eaten by him, which he partially did. Meiwes, also referred to by the media as the “Rotenburg cannibal”, was ultimately convicted of murder.
  • 2001: The load was unevenly distributed aboard a Florida National Guard aircraft. The machine with its 21 occupants got on without any problems and could be flown. However, when the captain went to the toilet en route, the center of gravity of the machine shifted to such an extent that it lost control and the aircraft crashed (see also Priority Air Transport Flight 528 ).
  • 2002: The pilots of a regional aircraft in Sabang , Indonesia , were about to taxi from the parking position to the runway when a delayed passenger ran out of the terminal and ran into the machine's propeller (see: Flight accident of a CASA Aviocar the Maimun Saleh Airport 2002 ).
  • 2005: Kenneth Pinyan , an American engineer, died of complications from a perforated bowel after having had passive anal intercourse with a stallion ( zoophilia ).
  • 2006: Australian wildlife filmmaker Steve Irwin died after getting close to a stingray while shooting underwater. When the animal defended itself, the stinger hit him in the heart.
  • 2006: Alexander Litvinenko , former FSB agent who defected to the British secret service MI6 , died of complications from radiation sickness caused by polonium-210 . The polonium had probably been given to him through contaminated tea.
  • 2008: Adelir Antonio de Carli, a Brazilian priest, wanted to use helium balloons to float through the air for 19 hours and break a world record to advertise his project - a relaxation room for truck drivers. Unfortunately he had underestimated the wind that drove him out to sea. Although he had a radio with him, he couldn't handle the GPS.
  • 2009: Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell was attacked and fatally injured by two coyotes . She is the first adult person known to be killed in such an attack in North America.
  • 2009: Larry M., a 25-year-old man from Council Bluffs , Iowa , was reported missing in November 2009. His disappearance was not cleared up until the beginning of 2019 when his remains were found. M. had apparently climbed onto a freezer at his workplace, a supermarket; Employees used this area as a quiet place to take a break. M. probably fell into a gap between the cupboard and the wall, from which he could not escape and from which he could not be heard due to the noise of the compressors .

2010s

  • 2010: Mike Edwards, cellist of the band Electric Light Orchestra , had a fatal accident in Devon when a 600 kg hay bale rolled down a steep slope and collided with his car.
  • 2010: 20 people died in an aircraft accident in the Democratic Republic of the Congo . A passenger had brought a crocodile on board a regional plane, which was able to free itself from its pocket on the approach to Bandundu . There was a mass panic, the passengers ran into the front part of the aircraft. This shifted the center of gravity of the machine, which consequently crashed (see: Crash of a Let L-410 of Filair near Bandundu ).
  • 2011: At a demonstration against the motorcycle - helmet law in the State of New York , the participants were moving demonstratively without helmets on their bikes in the 55-year-old Philip Contos crashed during a braking maneuver head first on the pavement and died from his Injuries that, according to the police, would not have been fatal if a helmet had been worn.
  • 2018: The 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess from Salisbury , England, died on July 8, 2018 after her partner gave her a perfume bottle with Novitschok . The poison came from the Skripal case .
  • 2018: The serial killer Egidius Schiffer died in his prison cell of cardiac arrhythmias after connecting his body to the power grid to stimulate himself sexually.
  • 2018: A 63-year-old man from Bremen died in August 2018 after being licked by his dog a few weeks earlier and contracting the bacterium Capnocytophaga canimorsus . Since the man was neither bitten nor had a weakened immune system , he fell out of the known risk group and is only the second known patient worldwide with such a severe course.
  • 2019: On April 12, 2019, a 75-year-old man died in Florida after his cassowary attacked and injured him while he was being fed. This is the second documented case of its kind (see 1926 ).

2020s

  • 2020: The American Mike Hughes died on February 22, 2020 when he tried to photograph the earth from a great height with a self-made rocket to prove that it was flat . However, the missile he was in crashed due to a defect in the parachute .

See also

Individual evidence

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