Embarrassingly Dumb Ways People Died - Darwin Awards Winners (Part 7)

There are many ways a person can kick the bucket, including the most embarrassing of all: their own stupidity. Surprisingly, an alarming number of pop their clogs each year due to their own blatant lack of risk assessment and self preservation skills. Luckily, this article will tell you all about them so you can avoid a similar fate. From the biggest dum-dums of the coronavirus pandemic, to people who lost battles against nature, here are some Darwin Award winners who naturally selected themselves out of existence.

Dumpster Drank

Of all the places you should never gather a nice refreshing drink from, a landfill site is pretty high on the list. Or at least it should be. But for one couple from Belarus, a landfill seemed just as good as a convenience store for acquiring drinks back in October 2020.

While scouring the local dump, as you do, a man found a bottle, filled with a mysterious, murky liquid, and took the bottle home to share its contents with his wife. It seemed the pair assumed it contained some perfectly safe to drink homemade hooch, and like a nice bottle of wine after a hard day’s work, popped it open to share.

Unsurprisingly, the next day, the couple became extremely ill, and while emergency services were called, it proved too late. The concoction in the bottle, it turned out, had indeed been homemade alcohol.

But its owner had seemingly disposed of it after realizing it wasn’t very good at all; in fact, it was completely poisonous. As a result, the couple kicked the bucket together, after what might be considered the worst romantic dinner of all time.

On The Fence

Some people will go to great lengths to protect their personal possessions. But one Brazilian man’s desperation to keep his car safe from thieves back in 2010 proved to be his downfall.

As robberies were becoming increasingly frequent in his local area, the fellow decided to keep his car protected by building a miniature electric fence around it. Only, that wasn’t any old "touch it and get a slightly uncomfortable warning shock" kind of fence. That one was amped up, and designed to hurt a lot. For a while, it seemed to work well, seeing as nobody stole the car.

But things soon came to a shocking conclusion, when on one occasion, he forgot he’d left the electric fence turned on when he attempted to move it aside to get into his car. He was electrocuted, and he’d built his contraption with such a high current that it killed him. Talk about being your own worst enemy!

A Refreshing Swim

How far would you go to save your phone? Would you be crazy enough to dive into an icy, partially frozen river to retrieve it? One man from Detroit did exactly that in February 2020. While fishing through a large hole he’d cut out of the ice, the fellow accidentally dropped his phone into the water.

Clearly lacking in any notion of self preservation, he dove straight in the hole after it. Unfortunately, he failed to realize that sudden submersion in ice cold water can be pretty bad for the human body. It can send you into shock, can instantly paralyze your muscles if you haven’t received training beforehand, and can even cause a heart attack due to intense constriction of your blood vessels.

Whether one of those physiological problems took hold, or whether he simply became disoriented under the ice remains unclear. All we know for sure is that he didn’t re-emerge until several hours later, when emergency responders pulled his lifeless body from the water.

We can only assume he must’ve had a glorious collection of cute animal pics on his phone to make jumping into icy doom seem worth it.

Lesson Not Learned

As the COVID-19 pandemic came into full swing in 2020, it brought a lot of Darwin Award contenders out of the woodwork. One example occurred at a Serbian Orthodox church in November 2020, following the death of a high ranking bishop.

The bishop’s death had been caused by coronavirus, yet the funeral held at the Church showed no regard at all for the types of conditions that lead to such an infection. The funeral was essentially a check list of everything you shouldn’t do if you want to avoid the disease.

There was: large crowds in an enclosed space; countless people being fed holy Communion from the same, unwashed spoon; and, of course, countless people kissing the hand of the recently deceased, who I must reiterate died of coronavirus! On top of that, there were only a handful of people wearing masks.

In a twist you probably saw coming, almost immediately after the funeral, the Church patriarch who’d organized and led the event also became seriously ill with COVID-19. He too died, having willingly failed to respect the advice of scientists on one of the most serious health disasters of the past 100 years. Hopefully, his funeral was a little more restrained.

Head of Serbian Orthodox Church dies after contracting coronavirus by euronews

Clotheslined

There are many dangers facing motorcyclists on the road. But one of the greatest of all is a rider’s own recklessness. That was proven one morning in 2008, when one motorcyclist took the ride of a lifetime near Manasota Key in Florida.

Witnesses reported seeing the risky rider, wearing nothing but swim trunks and sneakers, speeding towards the Manasota Key drawbridge, which was in the process of being raised up. He ignored the flashing red lights warning drivers to stay away from the bridge, and instead attempted to accelerate, hoping to jump the every growing gap.

News flash: he didn’t make it. He’d failed to spot the safety gate arms, which had already descended. He crashed head first straight into one of the gates and was instantly swept from his bike and onto the asphalt, while the bike itself continued up the ramp, across the gap, to the other side! While the rider failed to survive the ordeal, at least one of them made it across.

Robert Emmet Odlum: The First Brooklyn Bridge Jumper

On May 19, 1885, a man named Robert Emmet Odlum set out to be the first man to jump into New York City’s East River from the Brooklyn Bridge. His reasons for that strange aspiration were surprisingly well meaning, for the most part.

First and foremost, he sought to prove that, against the commonly held beliefs of the time people did not die simply by falling through the air. He hoped that demonstration would encourage people to be willing to jump from burning buildings into a safety net in the incident of a fire, as people were too distrusting of that idea at the time.

He also hoped to achieve some fame in proving it was safe. But unfortunately, any hopes he’d had of reassuring people about the safety of leaping from great heights were soon dashed when it came time to jump.

As Odlum leapt from the bridge’s roadway, 130 feet up, he attempted to stay straight in the air, but a strong wind blew him into a diagonal angle of descent. That meant, when he eventually struck the water, the angle of impact caused some serious damage.

Slapping the water at approximately 62mph, it exerted enough force to rupture his spleen, liver, and kidneys, and break several of his ribs. The official cause of death, however, was declared to be concussion.

On the bright side, people now know that rapidly falling doesn’t kill you, as much as the landing. In the words of British TV legend Jeremy Clarkson, “speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you.”

Hazard Prevention

Sometimes, you really have to wonder about people’s sense of logic. Case in point: two guys who suddenly landed on a sense of hazard awareness after doing something incredibly dangerous and stupid back in 2002.

In a farm field in Pennsylvania, two friends were practicing their marksmanship by shooting, not at bottles or cans, but the electrical insulators holding powerlines aloft overhead. After shooting 6 of the insulators off of two utility poles, a live, high voltage wire fell to the ground, risking setting the entire surrounding field ablaze.

Suddenly seized by an uncharacteristic sense of health and safety, one of the men rushed over to the wire and attempted to pick it up to move it to prevent danger. The instant he seized it in his hand, the powerful current passed through him, and he was fatally electrocuted. The lesson? If you’re going to suddenly grow a conscience, maybe try doing it before you do something lethally stupid.

Safety First

The saying, “practice what you preach” has never been more ironically fitting than in the case of one man who met his untimely demise in Australia in 2017. While filming a forklift safety video, the owner of a safety training school was thrown from the forklift he was driving and fatally crushed by its payload.

An investigation revealed that, despite what the intentions of the video had been, the man had broken several crucial rules to forklift safety. He was driving over rough, uneven terrain, at high speed, all while not wearing a seatbelt. Alongside an unhealthy sprinkling of driver error, it proved that sometimes, you really should listen to your own advice.

Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls

As most rational people can easily conclude, safety advice displayed at dangerous locations tends to be there for a reason. Not so bright people, however, often seem to have problems grasping that idea. That was proven by one woman on a pleasure trip to a natural waterfall at a tourist hotspot in Cauca, Colombia in January 2020.

While searching for the perfect selfie angle, the woman ignored safety warnings about wandering too close the edge of the waterfall. Paying more attention to her phone than where she was headed, she ended up plummeting over the waterfall’s edge, straight down into the boulder and rock filled pool below. The hard landing caused enough damage to her skull to set her expiry date to right there, right then.

Vending Machine Fatality

At some point, you may have heard you shouldn’t shake a vending machine, because it might fall on you. But nobody ever believes that’s ever actually happened. As it turns out, it actually did happen, back in 1984, in Safety Harbor, Florida.

As a newspaper article from the time recounts, a man had been attempting to get a can of soda from the vending machine in his apartment complex’s recreation center. Whether he paid his cash and the machine failed to dispense his goods, or whether he just decided to shake it to try and get a free drink, remains unclear to this day. All that’s known for sure is that an hour later, the thirsty fella was found, utterly crushed, with the vending machine on top of him.

Troublesome Transport

In 2020, a poorly chosen seating arrangement on a bus resulted in the unexpected demise of several people in Manatu, India. While being transported to a wedding venue on a very over crowded bus, several of the guests climbed up onto the roof top for the ride.

That was, of course, already a very risky idea, from the risk of falling off alone. But it wasn’t a fall that proved to be those rooftop riders’ ruin. Their downfall came, instead, in the form of some high tension, relatively low hanging electrical wires.

At their lofty perch, the riders were at head level with the wires, and before they had the chance to react, 3 of them struck the exposed wire directly and were electrocuted. One was killed instantly, another succumbed to his injuries later, while the third survived, albeit thoroughly fried.

Woman Freezes To Death In UFO Vigil

If an opportunity presented itself for you to communicate with extra terrestrials, would you take it? And if so, how far would you go to make sure you didn’t let the chance pass you by? One woman put the chance to commune with little green men above her own safety back in 1982.

Believing she’d been contacted by some type of intergalactic power, she convinced a willing companion to accompany her in carrying out the instructions of her alien contacts. She claimed they’d commanded her to drive out to an isolated location in the North-eastern Minnesota wilderness and await further instruction.

Assuming that would be a hugely significant moment in the interstellar advancement of humankind, the pair did exactly that, despite the extremely snowy winter weather. Once parked up in the designated location, they dutifully awaited the arrival of their extra-terrestrial acquaintances.

Unfortunately, their food supplies ran out after a week, and they lost access to water when the nearby lake froze over. Still, they refused to leave their post, on the off chance that the aliens appeared while they were gone. Putting total faith in the idea that the aliens would appear before anything bad happened to either of them, they stayed in the freezing cold, with nothing to eat or drink.

Eventually, frozen, starving, and fatally dehydrated, the woman died. Shortly after, the man accompanying her in his much weakened state, and with the car having been rendered unusable by the icy conditions crawled through a quarter mile of snow to save himself. He survived, but his alien contacting partner did not, and their little green guests never showed up.

Best Seats In The House

For as long as there have been sports events requiring tickets, there have also been people trying to find ways to watch for free. That unfortunate tendency to save a bit of cash proved to be the quite literal downfall of a number of football fans in San Francisco back in 1900.

To avoid the ticket fees, between 400 and 500 supporters clambered onto the roof of a glass factory so they could view a game taking place at San Francisco’s nearby Old Recreation Park stadium. But, in a twist of fate that somehow occurred to none of them as a possibility, the factory roof proved incapable of supporting all that weight.

20 minutes after kick off, not only did the roof collapse, but it also sent the revelers falling directly onto the blazing hot brick cover of a furnace vat filled with molten glass. To paint a picture of how hot that furnace was, several of the men who fell onto the cover instantly caught ablaze.

22 of the participants in that ill thought out plan were sent shuffling off that mortal coil from the incident, while 100 more suffered serious injuries. While people today may still not have learned the lesson to always pay for tickets, they seem to have learned not to pile en-masse onto factory roofs in the years since.

Michael Hatal's Bullet Catch

Being a magician can be a dangerous job at times, particularly if you specialize in risky looking illusions. While many classic nail biting tricks are often much safer than they seem, some of them are genuinely hazardous if not followed correctly, like "catching a bullet" tricks.

Obviously, tricks of that category under normal circumstances are never actually supposed to involve real bullets being fired by a magician’s assistant. But in 1889, an early performer of that trick had a serious mishap on stage.

Magician and cabinetmaker Michael Hatal took to the stage, promising his audience he could catch a speeding bullet using nothing more than the American flag wrapped around his body. He called an assistant up to the stage, and asked him to pick two pieces of ammunition from an ammo box for Hatal to load into a rifle.

At that point, Hatal would usually switch the rounds for blanks, but on that occasion, he accidentally swapped the real ammo for more real ammo. The volunteer took aim and fired, delivering a fatal blow to the unfortunate performer.

Luckily, Hatal survived just long enough to take responsibility for the blunder, clearing the volunteer’s name on his deathbed. On the bright side, he certainly gave the audience a performance they’d remember.

Man VS Cactus

Staying on the topic of firearm mishaps, we have the story of one man who lost a shootout against a stationary target. In 1982, a couple of petty criminals headed out into Arizona’s Sonoran Desert for a decidedly dumb purpose: shooting at cacti.

Their targets of choice were the local saguaro cacti, which can grow well over 40 feet tall, a fact which should’ve probably raised some alarm bells. But it didn’t, and the tremendous size and weight of each cactus only made them more appealing targets. The first cactus was shot down without incident, thanks to the powerful blast of a 16-gauge shotgun.

But the second target was larger, at almost 30 feet tall. One of the cactus vandals moved into point blank range to deliver the kill shot, pulled the trigger and brought huge chunks of the 2-tonne, spiky behemoth raining down upon himself. He was killed almost instantly by the weight of the spiky chunks that landed on him, while his buddy lived to share the tale.

Something To Lean On

In August 2020, an attempt to pose for a picture in an unusual spot ended very badly, showing just why you should be careful what you lean on. The photo opportunity in question occurred for one man at a large statue of a cross in São Paulo, Brazil.

The man climbed up the central concrete column of the cross and onto one of the arms, where he posed for a picture giving a thumbs up. However, he overestimated the strength of the upper beam, which he leant against while the picture was being taken. As he leant on it, the beam came loose and toppled right over, sending it and the man falling straight down to the ground.

A particularly nasty landing waited for him at the bottom, and to make matters worse, the heavy beam landed right on top of him. With the man’s religious photo opportunity ultimately proving fatal, if there is a God, it looks like he doesn’t appreciate selfies.

Alligator Affection

Sometimes, the universe seems to have a funny tendency of punishing people who put too much faith in their own good luck. Particularly those who willingly put themselves in unbelievably dangerous situations. Like one woman who put too much faith in her ability to not get eaten by hungry, wild animals in Kiawah Island, South Carolina in May 2020.

While in a drunken state, the woman decided to get waist deep in a local pond, which she knew was home to an alligator. That was despite the friend who watched from horror at the shore warning her the gator had been observed chowing down on a live deer a few days earlier.

Instead of taking that as a sign of the gator’s killing power, the woman instead retorted, “I don’t look like a deer!”, and waded over to pet the reptile. The gator, of course, wasn’t too keen on that idea, and grabbed her with its powerful jaws.

Miraculously, the woman managed to break free, and began wading back to shore, telling her friend, “I guess I won’t do that again!” And she was technically right, because she wouldn’t have the chance. Why? Because the gator grabbed her again while she was retreating and dragged her below the water to her demise. Unfortunately, one very important realization came all too late to that woman: you don’t mess with alligators.

A Dangerous Mix

In the world of lethal combinations, there are few dangerous pairings more obvious than water and electricity. But some people totally fail to grasp that fact. Like one man in New York, who grew impatient after a storm damaged some power lines along his street, leaving him without electricity.

Somehow, he landed on the idea that he’d be able to fix the problem easily if he could just remove the downed wires and replace them himself. Assuming he knew better than the emergency workers guarding the downed wires to keep the public safe, the man repeatedly attempted to gain access to them.

But after being shooed away several times, he decided to wait until the cover of darkness, at which point he returned to the site. With plastic bags on his feet for what he must’ve assumed was total protection from any electric threats, he began his idea of a fix.

Attempting to fast track the repairs, he tried to cut off part of the downed wire with an industrial power saw while absent mindedly standing on the wet, puddle covered floor left by the storm. As his saw reached the metal core of the wire, which he’d failed to realize was still live, his body, and the wet puddle his feet were in, provided the perfect circuit to the ground.

He was electrocuted with the full force of 4,800 volts. Needless to say, while his determination to help was commendable, a human body just wasn’t made to endure that kind of a shock. In a moment of lethal stupidity, the DIY moment proved fatal, well and truly earning that man a Darwin Award.

If you were amazed at these dumb ways people died, you might want to check out our entire Darwin Awards Series. Thanks for reading!