Freakish Fatalities: Strange But True!

Claim: A damaged cactus falls onto the man who had harmed it, killing him.

Status: True.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]

In southern arizona they have the sorts of cacti that have great arms like you see on old westerns, called saguaros. they're quite protected by various laws and live to be hundreds of years old.

The story goes that some guy was out with his shotgun shooting signs and such. Well, he decided to blast some cacti too. As he stood within a few feet, perhaps 10, of a giant old cactus, he blasted a few holes in its giant trunk. It gave way and fell right on top of him, crushing and impaling him with nail-like spikes. He died, being alone and unable to crawl away.

Origins: People do stupid, unthinking things. Most of the time, they get away with them . . . .

In 1982, roommates David Grundman and James Joseph Suchochi decided pack up the guns and go wandering in the desert two miles north of Arizona 74, just west of Lake Pleasant. One or both of them was struck with the brilliant notion of taking pot shots at saguaro they found growing there. Maybe it was the Devil in them. Maybe it had to do with the eerily manlike shapes these monstrous plants can grow into.

Grundman shot a small saguaro in the trunk so many times that it thudded to the ground. "The first one was easy!" he cried, according to Suchochi. He next chose a specimen which stood 26 feet high and was estimated to be a hundred years old. Before the ringing in his ears had stopped, a four-foot spiny arm, severed by the blast, fell on Grundman, crushing him.

Grundman's demise is chronicled in "Saguaro," a song by the Texas rock band, the Austin Lounge

Lizards.

There are other stories in urban lore about Nature's children taking revenge on their human tormentors (the dynamite dog and Gucci kangaroo, for instance), but this is the only one where a plant strikes back. Then again, the saguaro is one very special plant.

Saguaros are tall cactuses that can reach heights of 60 feet and grow only in the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States. For the first 75 years of their lives, they have only huge central trunks; their distinctive outstretched and upwards-bent arms develop later, if at all. Their usual lifespan is 150 to 200 years, though some have lived to be 300.

Oh, one other fact about saguaros; they can weigh up to 8 tons. As Grundman found out.

Electric Avenue: A True Story

Claim: A tourist was electrocuted while crossing a street in Las Vegas.

Status: True.

Origins: Las Vegas, Nevada, is a desert town, hot and dry. Daytime temperatures in July and August are in the hundreds, sometimes climbing to the hundred-and-teens. Rain, when it does come, often arrives in torrents that quickly build to flash-flood proportions.

On Saturday, 16 August 2003, a 39-year-old mother of four met the Grim Reaper while doing nothing more remarkable than crossing Las Vegas Boulevard, the famed "Las Vegas Strip" of the travelogues. Yet it was not a car that brought about Rebecca "Becky" Longhoffer's demise — she was

electrocuted in mid-stride when she stepped on a cast iron plate on a traffic island. The plate, which covered electrical wiring feeding traffic signals, had been soaked by a heavy downpour and was obscured by a puddle several inches deep, residue of a recent unexpected storm which swept the area.

Officials suspect that a combination of frayed wiring, dampness from the sudden storm, and open-toed shoes worn by the victim combined to deliver the electric shock that snatched a life without warning. The box that delivered the fatal charge had not been inspected since it was installed in late 1995 or early 1996; over the years thousands of pedestrians have walked across that wiring box, and the tread of many shoes on the plate may have worn down the insulation of the wires concealed therein to the point of dangerous exposure.

Clark County officials estimate Las Vegas has about 16,000 of the same type of traffic signal boxes. They announced they would begin inspecting the other boxes on the Las Vegas Strip within the next few weeks.

Ms. Longhoffer was making her first trip to Las Vegas, accompanying her fiancé who was participating in a billiards tournament. Moments before she died, she had been talking to her brother on her cell phone. She left behind four children, ages 22, 15, 12, and 13 months.

Doctor decapitated by Elevator: Internet Hoax or True Story?

Claim: A Houston doctor was decapitated by an elevator.

Status: True.

Origins: All manners of sudden fatality are horrendous no matter where or when or how they occur, but we seem to assign decapitations to a special category populated by modes of death we find particularly disturbing. This form of expiration is especially gruesome because the mind is cut off from the body, ending a life, and it all takes place in a flash. A person who moments before was a living, thinking being is now just a headless trunk, spurting blood like a ghoulish prop in a bad horror film. Though all forms of demise lead to the same place, this one is sickly fascinating thanks to its elevated gore quotient and the speed with which it drives home the finality of death.

We'd like to think beheadings happen only in campfire tales and low-budget thrillers, but they take place in real life too, as was the case in the death of Dr. Hitoshi Nikaidoh. On 16 August 2003, this 35-year-old surgical resident was decapitated in a freakish elevator accident at Christus St. Joseph Hospital in Houston, Texas.

The accident itself is hard now to imagine — the ill-fated physician was trapped between the doors of the cable-propelled elevator, then decapitated as the carriage ascended.

According to the Harris County Medical Examiner's office, Nikaidoh died from multiple blunt force injuries to the head and body. His corpse was retrieved from the bottom of the elevator shaft along with two pagers, a cell phone, and an electronic organizer police believed belonged to him. The upper portion of his head, which was severed just above the lower jaw, was found in the car of the elevator. His colleague, physician's

assistant Karin Steinau, who was in the car at the time, witnessed the whole thing.

Ms. Steinau told police the elevator had been out of service for a few days prior to to the tragedy, but at the time of the accident the "Out of service" sign had been removed. She had rung for the elevator (with the intent of going to the sixth floor) and had already stepped into it and pushed the button for her floor when Nikaidoh tried to get into the car as the door was closing. As soon as she saw he was trapped by the doors, Steinau tried to hit the emergency stop button but was unable to do so before the rising elevator had partially decapitated Dr. Nikaidoh. The elevator continued upwards, finally stopping between the fourth and fifth floors. Steinau was trapped in the car along with Nikaidoh's cranial remains until she was rescued by firefighters. She was treated in the hospital's emergency room for shock.

The cause of the deadly accident remains a mystery. Elevator doors should not shut when there is something between them, thanks to sensors mounted in the doors. Also, a set of contacts in the door should keep the elevator from moving if the doors are not closed. Yet both these things reportedly happened. A state investigative committee later reported that faulty wiring was to blame:

The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation report was done by Chief Elevator Inspector Ron Steele.

Steele said an inspection of the elevator's electrical wiring diagrams found that one controller stud had two wires connected to it, although the diagram indicated it should only have one. The controller stud on which the extra wire should have been placed was empty.

[Attorney Howard] Nations said the mistake bypassed safety systems that would have kept the door from closing and the elevator from ascending.

"In the course of testing and retesting the elevator [the maintenance company] had changed wiring and when they rewired it back to its original position they forgot to put this wire back where it goes," Nations said.

The maintenance company, Kone, Inc., had been working on the elevator for four days before the incident. This month, the hospital dismissed Kone from doing its elevator maintenance.

Mike Lubben, vice president of Kone, said the company still was reviewing the state report but an internal investigation concluded that a wire in an electrical panel was incorrectly connected.

"This contributed to a malfunction in the elevator doors," Lubben said. "Kone is deeply saddened by this incident. We offer our deepest condolences to the family of Dr. Nikaidoh."
Although elevator fatalities are not common they do occur from time to time, and they are not always of the "victim steps into an open elevator shaft" ilk. On 21 July 2003, 76-year-old L.A. Brown was killed at the Kenner Regional Medical Center in Kenner, Lousiana, when the gurney on which he was being transported to surgery in became trapped against the roof of an elevator when the car suddenly dropped several feet just as the gurney was being pulled out of it. On 7 May 1999, 56-year-old Mary Margaret Nowosielski died in similar fashion at the St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Michigan when the car her gurney was being rolled into suddenly went up, dragging her to the fourth floor and back down to the first floor between the car and the shaft wall.

Even elevator decapitations are not new. On 6 January 1995, a runaway elevator in a Bronx office building decapitated 55-year-old James Chenault as he tried to help fellow passengers out of a malfunctioning car. The car had stopped slightly above the second floor and the doors opened. While Chenault was holding the doors open with his back and helping a woman whose foot had become trapped, the car lurched suddenly upward, beheading him. The victim's body fell to the bottom of the shaft, but the head remained in the car along with the remaining passengers as it shot up to the ninth floor.

More than 30 people die in elevator-related accidents each year in the United States.

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Dutch Tourists and "Aphrodisiac" samosas in India

A Dutch couple on a visit to India were charged 10,000 rupees ($365) for four "aphrodisiac" samosas. When challenged over the bill, the stall holder told them his "special" samosas cost more because they were made of herbs and had aphrodisiac qualities, the Hindustan Times reported. The couple were roaming around a cattle fair in Bihar when they got hungry and ordered the four snacks from the hawker. After an argument, the couple paid the shopkeeper. However, not convinced that the high price of the snack was justified, the couple approached the police. Officers forced the shopkeeper to return the change - 9990 rupees. http://auckland.blogspot.com/