Asphalt Tatoo 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
This was reported in the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, dated 09/02/03 in a story titled, “Man, 20, dies after jumping out of car.” A follow-up article appeared the in the same paper. The event itself occurred in Littleton, Colorado on 09/01/03.
My kids love the Darwin Awards and the books that have arisen from same. For the past couple of years, these stories have been bedtime reading material for us (sometimes edited by dad). They get a huge kick out of them and are always on the lookout for contenders, so this one fairly leapt from the pages as I read it to them.
Now while the title of the news article tells the story, some detail is necessary:
It seems that young Tyler Weikel of Littleton, Colorado, had it in his mind that his life was just too boring. He decided he needed to spice things up a bit, a decision apparently fueled by the long-held desire to commemorate some grand and exciting event in his life through epidermal artistry. After the bandages came off. He might have thought to join the US armed services where in these times he’d face a very good chance of seeing combat, something that personal accounts tell us can be very exciting and worthy of commemoration. To the ill for him, but no doubt to the good for US military, this prospect never crossed Weikel’s mind. Something else a great deal more abrassive and unyielding than a stray thought was, however, about to cross his mind.
This was apparently no spur-of-the-moment impulse. Rather, the 20-year-old Weiksel had been incubating the notion of an airborne automobile exit stunt since middle school. His reasoning such as it was, was that this would be enough to cause serious, but not fatal bodily injury. While most of us might not think of a voluntary leap from a moving Subaru as especially momentous, young Weiksel saw it as not unlike Biblical parables repeated in the stained glass of European cathedrals, or the triumphs of Mayan kings etched in stone temples. The only difference was that his story would be inked in his very skin.
For reasons that will now remain forever unknown, his desire to prove Darwin correct seemed to increase in the weeks leading up to the date in question. In that time, friends and family report, he became more and more vocal, proclaiming to anyone who’d listen that he was deep in the process of planning “something dramatic.” Everyone knew he'd wanted the commemorative tatoo for a long time, but no one had a clue as to what he was actually planning. Apparently, this promise was dismissed by one and all as “just Ty, talking.” Proving the theory that vast sections of the gene pool are shallow indeed, even his father, who’d been informed by his son of the broader aspects of the plan, hadn’t thought to at least attempt to convince him that grievous bodily injury is usually something best left to chance.
On the fateful Labor Day in question, all Weiksel’s talk had permitted him to gin up the courage--or stupidity--to act. So, riding in the backseat of friend Erin Grubbs car and surprisingly unaided by any of the usual chemical resolve-stiffeners, he made his move. Or his leap.
Apparently, Weiksel never considered that in leaping from a car moving at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty mph, the pavement he’d be slamming into might well remove enough skin as to make it impossible to find a spot big enough to truly do his imagined skin illustration justice. As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry about this. How much of _his_ surface was removed by the _road_ surface went unrecorded in the family newspaper reports, but it doesn’t seem to matter as it turns out that few tattoo artists specialize in post mortem media. So the only place this astoundingly stupid stunt will be recorded is in a few passing local news stories. And in the memories of at least two kids who remain ever-astounded at the depth and breadth of human stupidity.
Submitted by Taylor and Rhianna Schell, ages 11 and 12 (with editing by dad).
Submitted on 09/13/2003
Submitted by:
Mike Schell
Reference:
Rocky Mountain News, 9/2-3/03
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