The Darwin Awards Countdown to Extinction (31 page)

 

 

Reference:
cbs4.com

 

 

15 DECEMBER 2009, GERMANY | A U2 subway driver found a body laying besides the underground tracks in Berlin. Because there was no video surveillance camera at that location, it took police two days to reconstruct what had happened. Apparently Yasin A., twenty-two, was alone in the subway car when he decided it would be a brilliant idea to destroy one of the windows. By swinging feet forward from a handrail into the window, he not only managed to burst the glass but also succeeded in being sucked out of the moving train, and was left dead on the tracks.

He was alone in the compartment at the time; if an observer had been present, perhaps the young underground rider would not have engaged in the destructive nonsense that led to his senseless death.

 

Reference: BZ Berlin

 

 

5 SEPTEMBER 2009, OREGON | Jake reached the summit of Saddle Mountain, and there and then he informed his friends that he planned to make a controlled slide down the cliff face. He would meet up with them in the parking lot or on the trail below.

Some folks are satisfied with the risks and rewards of dune sliding, and the chance of a 150-foot broken-limb tumble. Not Jake. The eighteen-year-old decided to “git-r-dun” down a thousand-foot cliff, instead. He slid pell-mell down the escarpment—and what was intended to be a controlled rockslide ended abruptly a thousand feet below the summit, when his body came to rest in a steep ravine.

Friends were shocked. “We are shocked,” they said, “because he is
always doing stuff like this
and coming out smiling.”

 

Reference:
OregonLIVE.com

 

“What a downer.”

“Why daredevils don’t live long.”

“Rocky Mountain Low.”

 

 

In the late fall and early winter months, snow-covered mountains become infested with hunters. One ambitious pair climbed high up a mountain in search of their quarry. The trail crossed a small glacier that had crusted over, and the lead hunter had to stomp a foothold in the snow one step at a time, in order to cross the glacier.

Somewhere near the middle of the glacier, his next stomp hit not snow but a rock. The lead hunter lost his footing and fell. Down the crusty ice he zipped, off the edge and out of sight. Unable to help, his shocked companion shouted out, “Are you OK?”

“Yes!” came the answer.

Reasoning that it was a quick way off the glacier, the second hunter plopped down and accelerated down the ice, following his friend. There, just over the edge, was his friend . . . holding on to the top of a tree that barely protruded from the snow.

There were no other treetops nearby, nothing to grab, nothing but a hundred-foot drop onto the rocks below. As the second hunter shot past the first, he uttered his final epitaph: a single pithy word.

 

Reference: The archives of an MD with thirty years of experience in the ER

 

“Truly a slippery slope.”

“O’er the glacier and through the snow . . . Whoa!
Look out below.”

“I think the world would be . . . biological.”

“Now this would be a winter Olympics sport I would watch!”

 

 

17 JULY 2009, GERMANY | Unexpected odds ’n’ ends are always turning up in train station lockers, but this may be the oddest yet. After a night spent carousing with friends, squeezing into the Ludwigshafen train station locker had seemed like an amusing idea to the man. He shut himself in a suitcase locker for fun, but the laughter faded as the oxygen supply dwindled. His companions were unable to open the locked door and free the twenty-year-old! With time running out, police broke open the door and dragged the groggy prankster to safety.

Our alert readers ask, “Just
why
did they let him out . . . ?”

 

Reference: Reuters

 

 

 

16 NOVEMBER 2009, WASHINGTON | Seattle police were searching for a reported assault victim when they heard screams of pain and followed their ears to a grisly scene: a man impaled on a fence post! They supported him to prevent further injuries until fire department personnel arrived to stabilize him and transport him to a hospital.

Suspecting that he was the victim in the reported assault, officers interviewed Vlad the Impaled (his name was not released) in his hospital bed. The man insisted that he was
not
being chased, but rather thought he was a ninja and could successfully vault a five-foot spiked fence. The man’s mad ninja skills, it seems, were bested by the fence—and he ended up stuck like a pig.

He is no Darwin Award winner, merely an At-Risk Survivor. His skewered carcass was in serious but stable condition in intensive care when last we checked. A police spokesman summarized the situation: “Clearly he was overconfident in his abilities.”

 

Reference:
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, AP,
msnbc.com

 

 

11 JULY 2009, NEW YORK | On a ten-day camping trip deep in the Adirondacks, a guide noticed a dead birch leaning toward one of the tents. This was dangerous! The guide enlisted three members of the church group to help deal with the tree situation.

First they tried pushing the fifty-foot tree over—it was leaning at quite an angle—but that had no effect whatsoever. Then they whacked at it with trekking poles, but that only scraped up the bark. Finally they decided that the only alternative was to pull down the tree.

The guide removed the haul line from the bear bag and threw it over a short branch halfway up the tree. By pulling on each end of the line, they planned to wedge the dead tree against a sturdy live tree that was situated well away from the tent. They figured that this would avoid damage to the campsite.