I work at a funeral home owned by my father in Springfield, MA. I've seen a fair share of possible Darwins. These are my two favorites

Story 1: Death Prevents Darwinian Death On October 1, we responded to a death call from one of the low-cost apartments in the downtown area. We took our stretcher and rode the elevator up to the tenth floor of the building. We identified the apartment of the deceased by the gathering crowd outside the room and the police officer standing in front of the door. Upon entry, we found the deceased laying on the floor on his chest, pants unzipped and barely still covering his butt, forehead smashed into the metal frame of his bed. When we rolled him over, his mouth was opened wide in an "O" shape. His one eye was equally wide open while his other was squeezed shut. His oxygen tube was in his nose, but the other end was connected to nothing. Whether this was the cause of his death is unknown, and is not the point of the story. As we examined the room (to figure out how to remove the gentleman without destroying any more of his dignity), we tallied up his oxygen supply (just out of curiousity). The supply in the small, single room apartment totaled over 500 lbs of compressed oxygen. As we cleared off a table, which we needed to move to get the stretcher to the man, I paused to read the "no smoking, oxygen in use sign" tacked to the wall. After removing that day's newspaper from the table, I stopped again. I had discovered the man's secret cigarette stash. The man had well over a hundred used cigarette butts in a bowl he had clearly used as an ashtray. Next to the bowl were six packs of smokes and two cigarette lighters. This table and the potentially deadly (in a way not warned of by the surgeon general) items on it were less than ten feet from the man's oxygen supply. We finished our job, zipping the man up in a body bag and strapping him to the stretcher before rolling him out the door, all the while quietly talking about what his last thoughts were when he died, and what they would have been if his smoking had killed him in a slightly more explosive way. Based on the look on his face when we found him, his final thoughts likely would have been the same "oh $@!^"

Story 2: Flying Home There was a well off lawyer in Springfield who refused to be on an airplane piloted by anyone other than himself, simply because he didn't trust anyone other than himself to be a good enough pilot to handle the precious cargo that he was. For that reason he bought himself a twin engine turboprop which he housed at Barnes Municipal Airport, about 25 miles outside of the city. The man clocked thousands of flight hours, as his work often required him to travel. At around 2AM one night, concluding a late night flight from Cincinatti, he landed at Barnes. He taxied toward his craft's hangar where, most likely due to fatigue, he mistakenly pushed the throttle levers forward, putting the engines under full power. The lawyer/pilot's aircraft entered the hangar (note: the hangar door was closed) at what police estimated to be at least 90 mph. The aircraft, hangar, and everything inside was incinerated in the resulting fire. Dental records were required to identify the pilot

Submitted on 11/02/2005

Submitted by: Steven James
Reference: Personal Account

Copyright © 2005 DarwinAwards.com

James said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
The first story was amusing, but unfortunately doesn't qualify. The second story, however, does! The pilot displayed all the arrogance and stupidity I need to see. Being too paranoid to fly with anyone else at the stick, ehe buys his own plane, logs thousands of hours, and then incinerates himself by committing one of the simplest and most avoidable pilot errors possible! I will vote PA for now; if you can provide further proof (ie an obituary or article), I think it's a potential DA!

Greg said:
Neutral: Personal Account
Driving tired is dumb. Flying a plane tired is surely suicidal! I think the first one could be an HM ... just because the guy died anyway shouldn't exclude him from trying to earn a DA. ;-)

Tracy said:
Definitely Keep: Darwin Award
If you can send a link for the second story, it sounds like a worthy DA!

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