STRANGE DEATHS UNUSUAL WAYS OF SHUFFLING OFF THIS MORTAL COIL
Ray Galindo was leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Modesto, California, when he was struck by drunk driver Brandon Howze and killed. Armando, one of Galindo’s fellow AA members, said: “What an irony of life to come here and try to be sober, try to be a better person, and then you go out by one of us, technically” dailymail.co.uk, 10 May 2021.
When police arrested a man for dangerous driving after he crashed near the town of Jafre in Spain, near the French border, after driving 19 miles (30km) down the wrong side of a motorway, they made a macabre discovery. Strapped into the passenger seat under a blanket was the body of a Swiss man. He appeared to have been dead for some time as the body had started to decompose, with the hands already appearing mummified. On questioning, it became clear that the corpse belonged to the driver’s partner and that the drive had begun several weeks earlier as a final road trip for the terminally ill man, taking a meandering route from Spain through France and into Italy, then back again, taking more than three weeks as they dodged coronavirus restrictions. The passenger had passed away en route, but the driver could not bear to leave his partner behind, so carried on with their journey. Times, 12 April 2021.
An inquest into the death of exiled Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov, 68, who died by apparent suicide in 2018, concluded that he had, in fact, been murdered by someone who had tried to make it look like a suicide. Glushkov had been found dead with a dog lead around his neck next to a small stepladder in his home in New Malden, Surrey, a week after Russian agents poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury. Medics were immediately suspicious because of the careful placing of the suicide paraphernalia and the fact that the stepladder had not been knocked over, as is more usual in suicides. The coroner concluded that Glushkov, a former Aeroflot director and a critic of President Putin, had been killed using a “garotted sleeper hold” by an unknown third party. D.Mail, 10 April 2021.
Twelve-year-old Joshua Haileyesus died in hospital in Aurora, Colorado, several days after his twin brother found him collapsed on the bathroom floor of their home. Haileyesus had apparently been trying to take part in a “blackout challenge” that had gone viral on TikTok encouraging people to post videos of them choking themselves until they passed out. He had previously bragged to his brother about being able to hold his breath for a minute. Knoxville News-Sentinel 16 April, 2021.
The body of a 39-year-old man was discovered in the leg of a lifesized papier-mâché stegosaurus in Santa Coloma de Gramenet near Barcelona after a passer-by and his son noticed the smell. The father peered through a crack in the dinosaur’s leg and saw the corpse, face down, jammed inside. Local police said: “This person got inside the statue’s leg and got trapped. It looks as though he was trying to retrieve a mobile phone, which he’d dropped. It looks like he entered the statue headfirst and couldn’t get out.” It is believed he got in through a hatch in the creature’s belly. The victim’s family had recently reported him missing after not seeing him for two days, believing him to be sleeping rough. The statue was originally been built to promote a local cinema and was known to be used by rough sleepers. It has now been removed after firefighters had to saw the leg off to retrieve the dead man. Guardian, 24 May; Iflscience.com, Independent, BBC News, 25 May 2021.
Alerted by flies and a stench coming from the flat of Clara Ines Tobon, 79, neighbours in her Madrid apartment block called the police. When officers broke in, they found Tobon’s corpse lying on the floor surrounded by the bodies of five of her cats, which had died of starvation, along with two more that were alive but severely malnourished. It appeared that Tobon had died of Covid-19 at least three months before she was discovered and that her pets had eaten most of her body from the waist up before it had become too decomposed to be edible. An autopsy on one of the dead cats confirmed that it had eaten its owner’s flesh. Tobon, who had moved to Spain from Colombia decades ago, lived alone and had no partner or children, and few friends, neighbours said. A spokesman for the social housing agency where she lived said they had not noticed their tenant was dead as her bills continued to be paid on time. 7news.com. au, 2 Jun 2021.