From a dog landing on someone’s head to celebrating a goal, here are 15 tales of death striking from the oddest angles.
Death is a fascinating topic for many; there is a deep, intrinsic fear of our mortality and of how fragile it can be. Alas, we are not all destined to die of old age, even for those of us who stay out of harm’s way. Here’s some tales to illustrate my point.
Professional footballer Peter Biaksangzuala was 23 and a defensive midfielder for Bethlehem Vengthlang FC. He celebrated scoring a goal with an acrobatic somersault (shown here). Unfortunately, he landed on his head and badly damaged his spinal cord. Biaksangzuala passed away soon after in intensive care.
Talking about footballers, 28 year old Luciano Re Cecconi was a midfielder for the historic Scudetto-winning Lazio side of 1974. He was known for his Duracell-battery energy but also for his love of practical jokes. One day, he went too far. He and a teammate went to visit their friend’s jewellery shop and thought it would be a hoot to pretend to be armed robbers and do a stick up. Unbeknownst to them, their friend Bruno Tabochini had been burgled weeks prior and had since acquired a shotgun. Masking their faces with their jackets, they burst in and shouted ‘stick em up,’ this is a robbery!’ Tabochini blasted Cecconi with his shotgun and the superstar footballer died 30 minutes later with his dying breath, gasping, ‘It was just a joke.’
Guns don’t kill people; people do …except when it’s a dog. 30 year old Joseph Austin Smith was in the passenger seat of his friend’s truck while they were out hunting. In the back seat was their hunting equipment, his rifle and his friend’s dog. The hound discharged the gun into Smith’s back. Smith, much loved by all, died almost instantly. The dog was not a ‘good boy’ that day.
Indeed, animals can be unintentionally dangerous. 57 year old Judy Kay Zagorski was at the bow of a boat with her vacationing family in the Florida Keys. The boat was moving rapidly at 25 mph (40 kmh) as it emerged from a channel. A large 75 lb (34 kg) Spotted Eagle Ray suddenly leapt out of the water in front of Zagorski, smashing into her head. She suffered multiple skull fractures and a massive brain injury, which killed her pretty much instantly.
The animal in this story certainly didn’t want to be dangerous: Octogenarian Shivdayal Sharma was relieving himself on train tracks in India, but it wasn’t a train that killed him. An express train smashed into a cow instead. This is not a rare thing in India; 13,000 bovines were hit by trains in 2022 alone, however this one flew 30 metres (98 ft) through the air and a part of it hit Sharma, killing him instantly.
Chef Peng Fan’s death seemed more karmic. In southern China, the chef was preparing soup made with the flesh of an Indochinese spitting cobra, which is considered a delicacy in those parts. Peng had decapitated the snake but the snake got its revenge from beyond the grave. Reptiles can function for up to an hour after having body parts removed, and 20 minutes after decapitating the snake Peng went to throw its head in the bin when the snake bit him, injecting powerful flesh-killing, neurotoxic venom. Victims of the cobra generally asphyxiate after the neurotoxin paralyses their respiratory system, and so, Peng perished before he could be given the anti-venom.
Meanwhile Philippine Police Chief Lt Christian Bolok was actually trying to save an animal but still suffered fatally. He and his men raided an illegal cock-fight. As they were breaking it up Bolok picked up one of the cocks. These mean birds don’t just fight with their sharp beaks, their owners attach a ‘gaff’ to the bird’s claws to make them even deadlier. A gaff is a razor sharp blade and, as Bolok manhandled the bird, its gaff pierced his femoral artery. Bolok’s colleagues tried to apply a tourniquet to the wound and rush him to hospital but the policeman died of blood loss.
25 year old Ukrainian chemistry student Vladimir Likhonos loved chemistry so much he liked to make his own firecrackers. He also had the odd habit of chewing gum that he would dip in citric acid. Likhonos and his mother were in the living room one night and he was on his computer. The lad’s mother heard a loud bang and whipped her head around in horror to see her son’s jaw had been blown off. It seems, Likhonos had kept his citric acid and an unidentified substance (presumably used to make the firecrackers) side by side, and this unidentified substance had blown his jaw off. There was nothing paramedics could do to save him.
One’s apartment isn’t necessarily one’s safe space then; not for 59 year old Spaniard Sergio Millan; not when his roof suddenly caved in on him. Two miles (3.2 km) away near Tarragona, a petrochemicals factory erupted in a massive explosion. This launched a 1-ton sheet of metal into the air that came crashing down into the apartment above him and through his ceiling.
Elsewhere in Spain, an unnamed 39 year old had been reported missing by his family when a father and son smelled a foul odour emanating from a papier-mache stegosaurus statue in a suburb of Barcelona. They discovered a man’s body through a crack in the hollow statue’s leg and called the police. It would appear that the unfortunate gentleman had dropped his mobile phone through the top of the statue and tried to retrieve it by entering it head first and got stuck. I imagine, it being May in Spain, it got very hot in there and heat exhaustion finished him off quickly.
Supermarket employee Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada also entered where he wasn’t supposed to. He was last seen the day after Thanksgiving in Iowa leaving his house barefoot in a snowstorm whilst suffering hallucinations. Employees at the No Frills supermarket Moncada worked at reported that they often climbed on top of the coolers into an area used mostly for storage and, it seems, Moncada returned to the supermarket for whatever reason and fell down the back of one of the coolers into a 12 ft (4 m) space. There, he perished; his cries for help likely drowned out by the loudness of the cooler’s motors. His corpse was only discovered 10 years later.
Someone else who got trapped was mother Elizabeth Isherwood, 60. She was found dead and naked in an airing cupboard at a country club which she was staying at while on holiday. She had gone on holiday alone and the theory is that, in the middle of her first night there, before she had even unpacked, she had gone to use the en-suite toilet but, in the darkness and unfamiliar room, had mistaken the airing cupboard door for her bedroom door. Once closed behind her she tried to open it again but the handle came off and she was screwed. After breaking a pipe she was sprayed with water – leaving her drenched before hypothermia set in. The coroner recorded a conclusion of ‘misadventure.’
Another mum, 21 year old Belarusian Yulia Sharko, was killed by her 2 year old. Sharko was trying to remove her infant daughter from the front seat of her car while leaning through the open window. As she was trying to lift her child, the little one accidently operated the electric window and strangled her mother with it. She was trapped for some time before her distraught boyfriend smashed the window and rushed her lifeless body to hospital. There, doctors announced that Sharko had suffered irreversible brain damage. It was her birthday on the day she died.
Darren Hickey was a wedding planner and one day was given a small fishcake to sample by a chef. This fishcake was so blisteringly hot, however, it burned the back of his throat. A few hours later, with the pain increasing, Hickey went to the hospital but was sent home again after getting some paracetamol. The burn was so far down his throat, his doctor could not see it unless they had used a special procedure. But the swelling worsened and later Hickey’s partner found him choking. 12 hours after sampling the fishcake, Hickey was pronounced dead.
Perhaps Hickey should’ve soothed the burn with a nice drink of water, but not too much! You can have too much of anything, even that most life-sustaining element – H2O. 28-year-old Jennifer Strange died after competing in a radio station’s on-air water-drinking contest. After downing some six litres (1.3 gallons) of water in three hours in a “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” (Nintendo game console) contest, she vomited, went home with a splitting headache, and died from overhydration.
I could go on. Instead, I’ll sign off with the tale of how a dog fell off a balcony in Buenos Aires and resulted in the deaths of THREE pedestrians below.
Cachy the poodle was chasing a ball thrown by its owner when he crashed through the balcony railings to plummet 13 floors to his doom. He slammed into the head of a senior lady below, killing them both. A crowd gathered and a young lady across the avenue was curious about the cause of the commotion. She stepped out in the road to cross over without looking and was knocked down by a bus. Then, a man, having first witnessed the woman killed by the falling dog before the second lady’s fatal impact by the bus, suffered a heart attack from the trauma of it all. He too expired on that street.
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