STRANGE DEATHS
UNUSUAL WAYS OF SHUFFLING OFF THIS MORTAL COIL
Mourners at the funeral of 79-year-old Claribel Oppenheimer at Evergreen Cemetery, Brooklyn, looked on with mounting horror as bickering cemetery staff attempted to jam her coffin into an undersized grave.
After trying to force it to fit, repeatedly pulling and tugging it, the workers resorted to bringing in a digger to enlarge the grave, yelling, “Get out of the way” at mourners. They abandoned Mrs Oppenheimer’s coffin on the grass while one worker unhelpfully told crying family members, “This section of the cemetery has had this problem before with coffins not fitting properly into the graves.” By this time, the coffin had been so badly damaged that the body was exposed, and it had been shaken around so much that Mrs Oppenheimer’s hands were no longer clasped as they had been at the funeral home and relatives feared she would fall out. After further argument about the state of the coffin, Mrs Oppenheimer was taken to a funeral home and transferred to a replacement casket, after which she was successfully consigned to her final resting place at last – but headfirst instead of horizontally. The whole ordeal lasted more than four hours during which one of the mourners collapsed with chest pain and was taken to hospital. The Oppenheimer family lawyer Eric Rothstein said, “No one should have to endure a situation like that at a funeral, it meant more grief, mental anguish that no one should have to suffer.” nypost.com, 3 Aug 2021.
At 10am on 23 July, police and firefighters arrived at a small brushfire in Sherbrooke, Quebec, which, witnesses said, was caused by someone setting fire to a silicone mannequin. The blaze was swiftly extinguished, and the authorities agreed that the charred mannequin should be disposed of in a skip behind Sherbrooke police station. Four hours later a man filed a missing persons report for his partner, which police followed up by tracking her mobile phone data. Finding that her last known location was in the street where the fire had been extinguished that morning, “a police officer who intervened earlier raised the coincidence insightfully” according to a police spokesman. This led to officers retrieving the “mannequin” from the skip and identifying it as the body of the missing woman. Pathologist Dr Robert Nicholson said it wouldn’t be unreasonable to mistake a burnt body for a mannequin because the human body is composed of about 60 per cent water and loses a lot of weight if it is severely burned, resulting in remains that neither look nor feel like a normal person. At the time of reporting, police had not come up with a cause of the death, which does have characteristics that bring to mind spontaneous human combustion. cbc.ca, 29 July 2021.
A post-mortem report on former mayoress of Bolton, Delyse Critchley, concluded that the 68-year-old had died of caffeine poisoning. Critchley was found dead in her bed in Bolton on 8 April after police forced their way into her house following reports of concern for her welfare. Coroner Timothy Brennand said there were no suspicious circumstances and that “the cause of death is highly unusual in that the substance that clearly has been implicated being caffeine”. It is possible to overdose on caffeine if you consume more than 400 milligrams in a day, about the amount in four strong cups of coffee, but it is not known how Mrs Critchley ingested the substance. Mail on Sunday, 20 June 2021.
Allen Smith (80), a retired Baptist minister, regularly visited the South Shore senior home where Ted Merchant (67), lived. Merchant was attempting to set up his own ministry, named Straight Gate, and often held services in the home. He and Allen spent a lot of time discussing scripture, and sometimes these discussions became heated. “They’d talk about Bible passages and ideas about God. They always had little arguments going on about things like that,” said fellow resident Dorothy Hull. After one 2016 session, though, Merchant pulled a gun and shot Allen twice in the head, killing him instantly. After the killing, Merchant fled the scene on a motorised disability scooter, then hid in a car parked in the home’s parking lot, where police found him five hours later. In Dogwood Extension, Waynesborough, Mississippi, another argument over Bible verses led to a similar outcome this July. Sherrod Alexander (32) and Samuel McDougle (41) were reading the Bible together when they hit a fundamental disagreement over one of the verses. This led to a fist fight that only ended when McDougle strangled Alexander to death. Chicago Tribune, 7 Sept 2016, wlox.com, 15 Jul 2021.