Clothing-bin death more than ‘misadventure’

As surprised as I was to read this week’s news story about a Toronto woman who died after becoming trapped in a clothing donation bin — firefighters who cut open the box to get her out arrived too late — I was even more surprised by the term police investigators used to describe their working hypothesis for the incident: “death by misadventure.”

If “death by misadventure,” a legal term describing a manner of death, applies to cases where an accident occurred as a result of voluntarily assumed risks, which is the generally agreed upon definition (it’s a term more commonly used by coroners in the United Kingdom than here), then the Toronto woman (whom friends have identified as Crystal) probably did die by misadventure, looking to the drop bin for warm clothes or a spot to take refuge from the street.

Note that a friend of Crystal’s told the Toronto Sun’s Liz Braun that Crystal might even have been seeking a safe space to do drugs, though we’ve been given no proof that this was the case — just reports from her friends that Crystal had addiction issues.

Yet “misadventure” seems such a strange and wanting word to describe what happened to Crystal.

The 35-year-old woman, likely fuelled by desperation, made dangerous choices that led to her dying in a way so bizarre as to add indignity to her fatal injury. And at least six other Canadians have met the same fate in donation bins since 2015.

Although there is perhaps a very small tragicomic aspect to these deaths — getting physically stuck in a charity box sounds uncomfortably close to a gag or prank — they are hardly the sort of incidents we’d generally describe as adventures.

No one is likely to look upon the charity-box deaths as exciting exploits or adventurous escapades.

Indeed, what is saddest about these cases, like so many cases that are classified as “death by misadventure,” is that though they bear some of the trappings of madcap zaniness, they couldn’t be more sobering or sombre.

My Google News search for “death by misadventure” brings up over 2,500 results, some of them simple cases of drug overdoses, but others painfully odd episodes, such as the 2018 Ottawa Citizen story of a couple of drunk teenagers who were fooling around with heavy equipment

WHAT IS SADDEST ABOUT THESE CASES IS ... THEY COULDN’T BE MORE SOBERING OR SOMBRE.

at a construction site on a Thanksgiving evening when one of them accidentally ran over the other, killing him.

Addison Esprit, who lived near the construction site, told the Citizen that on the night of the death, he heard frantic knocking on his door. When he answered it, he was greeted by an intoxicated, shirtless young man covered in blood.

“He was crying that he had killed his friend,” Esprit said. “That’s a stupid way to die.”

It is a stupid way to die. Stupider than a freak accident because there were choices involved, and perhaps stupider still because drunk-driving heavy-duty construction equipment is such an obviously bad idea and yet the price paid was so much dearer than anyone really deserves for dumbness.

Though no dictionary will say so, what “death by misadventure” seems to mean a lot of the time is that a person has died after voluntarily taking risks he shouldn’t have — has been irresponsible — but not before someone else has failed in many ways that made the risk-taking possible. Crystal got herself into that charity bin in Toronto, but it took a certain bin design to keep her trapped therein, not to mention city-wide housing and drug problems to set her up for finding a bin appealing in the first place.

It is the Ottawa-area teenager’s fault for killing his friend while drunkenly operating stolen machinery, but there are also people out there who should have se- cured the ignition keys and the construction site itself before leaving for a holiday.

Still, the “he or she ought to have known better” aspect of death by misadventure is a big part of what gives the concept its sting, and makes the term seem so light in comparison to the weight of what it describes.

In June, The Washington Post reported on a 22-yearold British man who offered to show his friends that the vest he was wearing was “stab-proof.” He died of a selfinflicted knife wound.

The coroner deemed the man’s death the result of “misadventure.” Which sounds like a punchline. Until you continue reading the story and get to the pain of the young man’s mother, who told an inquest into her son’s death that she simply “couldn’t absorb it.”

Technically, a death by misadventure involves no crime. Practically, a death by misadventure is likely to involve a bizarre twist or circumstance. Neither of these facts makes a death by misadventure any less painful, or any easier to abide.