STRANGE DEATHS

UNUSUAL WAYS OF SHUFFLING OFF THIS MORTAL COIL

Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University, has suggested that three scientists investigating the melting of Arctic ice may have been assassinated within the space of a few months in early 2013. They are Seymour Laxon (49) and Katherine Giles (35), both climate change scientists at University College London, and Tim Boyd (54) of the Scottish Association for Marine Science. Prof Laxon fell down a flight of stairs at a New Year’s Eve party in Essex and Dr Giles died in a collision with a tipper truck in Victoria, London, while cycling to work on 8 April. Dr Boyd is thought to have been struck by lightning and killed instantly while walking his dogs near his home in Port Appin, Argyll, western Scotland, on 25 January 2013. Prof Wadhams said that the deaths “were accidents as far as anybody was able to tell but the fact they were clustered like that looked so weird.” He said that in the weeks after Prof Laxon’s death he believed he was himself targeted by an unmarked lorry that tried to force him off the M25 motorway. He reported the incident to the police. Asked who might be responsible, he replied: “I can only think of the oil lobby but I don’t think the oil lobby goes around killing people,” adding that he feared being labelled a “loony”. Times, 25 July; Sunday Telegraph, 26 July 2015.

Devon Staples, 22, and his friends were celebrating the Fourth of July in Calais, Maine, a small city on the Canadian border. They were drinking and setting off fireworks in a friend’s back yard. Staples placed a reloadable fireworks mortar tube on his head and told his friends he was going to light it. His friends urged him against it, but he went ahead and was killed instantly. Staples, 22, worked as a costume performer at Disney World, portraying characters including Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. “Devon was not the kind of person who would do something stupid,” said his brother Cody, 25. “He was the kind of person who would pretend to do something stupid to make people laugh.” It was the first fireworks fatality in Maine since the 1949 law banning fireworks was repealed on 1 January 2012. [AP] 5 July; D.Telegraph, 7 July 2015.

An estate agent who capsized on a canoeing trip on 4 January drowned as he was driving home two hours later because of the effect of water in his lungs. Alan Gough, 57, from Walsall, West Midlands, died from a rare phenomenon known as “secondary drowning” after his canoe upturned on Ullswater in the Lake District. He had managed to swim the 50 yards back to shore after the minor accident and seemed to have only suffered a nosebleed; but he had swallowed some water and collapsed at the wheel while driving home with his friend, John Robinson. Mr Gough’s car careered off the road at 30mph (48km/h) and crashed into a drystone wall at the foot of the Kirkstone Pass in Cumbria. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Secondary drowning accounts for only between one and two per cent of drownings. It occurs when fluid accumulates in the lungs, damaging the membranes and hindering the transfer of oxygen to the bloodstream. More common in children than in adults, it can take 72 hours to occur, with symptoms including coughing, extreme fatigue or chest pain. D.Telegraph, D.Mail, 5 June 2015.

A technician was killed by a robot at a Volkswagen plant at Baunatal, near Kassel in Germany, on 29 June. A 22-year-old external contractor was installing the robot together with a colleague when the robot struck him in the chest and pressed him against a metal plate. He later died of his injuries. VW said the robot had not suffered a technical defect and blamed human error. Robots in western production plants are kept behind safety cages to prevent accidental contact with humans, but in this case the contractor was standing inside the safety cage. A Volkswagen spokesman stressed that the robot was not one of the new generation of lightweight collaborative robots that work sideby-side with workers on the production line and forgo safety cages.

There was another death-by-robot on 12 August, when sharp welding sticks jutting out of a robotic arm pierced the abdomen of a worker, killing him at an auto ancillary production factory in Gurgaon, near New Delhi in India. Ramji Lal, 24, had apparently moved too close to the machine while adjusting a metal sheet that had come unstuck. Robots have caused at least 26 workplace deaths in the US alone in the past 30 years. The first was in 1979, at a Ford production line in Flat Rock, Michigan, when a robot arm killed Robert Williams, 25. Financial Times, 1 July; D.Mail, Sun, 3 July; Times of India, 13 Aug 2015.

A seven-month-old baby girl was at Cambodia’s Mekong River with her family when her aunt Chea Sophia caught a fish. Sophia dangled the fish in front of the little girl, who laughed as the fish wriggled about; but it then slipped from Sophia’s hand, flopped into the baby’s mouth and lodged itself in her throat. Unable to remove it, the horrified aunt rushed the baby to hospital, but was too late to save her. Inquisitr. com, 22 June 2015.

Linda Clarene Jackson, 59, beat her boyfriend David Ruiz to death with canned food at her home in Lake Los Angeles, southern California, on 16 June. She was charged with striking him on the head with a can of peas, a can of carrots and a can of chicken broth. If convicted, she faces life in state prison. [AP] 18 June; Latimes. com, 19 June 2015.