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The Official Darwin Awards1. The Laundry1998) A 39-year-old Charlottesville man died Thursday in a freak accident involving his washing machine. According to police reports, Samuel Randolph Strickson was doing laundry when he tried to speed up the process. Strickson apparently tried to stuff approximately 50 pounds of laundry into his washing machine by climbing on top of the washer and attempting to force the clothing into the basin. Strickson then apparently accidentally kicked the washing machine's ON button. When the machine turned on, Strickson lost his balance and both feet went down into the machine, where they got stuck.
The machine started its cycle, and Strickson, unable to free himself, started thrashing around as the machine's agitator went into gear. Strickson's head banged against a nearby shelf in the laundry room, knocking over a bottle of bleach, which poured over Strickson's face, blinding him. Forensic reports say Strickson apparently also swallowed some of the bleach. He then vomited, but was still unable to free himself. Strickson's dog, then apparently came into the laundry room.
At about the same time, according to police, a large box of baking soda fell from the shelf, startling the dog, who then urinated. Urine, like vinegar, is acidic, and the chemical reaction between the urine and the baking soda resulted in "a small explosion," according to police reports. The dog, however, escaped unharmed. Strickson remained stuck in the washing machine, which eventually went into its high-speed spin cycle, spinning Strickson around at about 70 miles per hour, according to forensic experts. Strickson's head then smashed against a steel beam behind the washing machine, immediately killing him. A neighbor heard the commotion and called 911, but Strickson was pronounced dead at the scene.
2. OverkillIn France, Jacques LeFevrier left nothing to chance when he decided to commit suicide. He stood atop a sheer cliff and tied a noose around his neck. He tied the other end of the rope to a large rock. He drank some poison and set fire to his clothes. He even tried to shoot himself at the last moment. He jumped and fired the pistol.
The bullet missed him completely and cut through the rope above him. Now freed from the threat of hanging, he plunged into the sea. The dunking extinguished the flames and made him vomit the poison. He was dragged out of the water by a kind fisherman and was taken to a hospital, where he died of hypothermia.
3. Gerbil Rocket(1997 - 1998) "In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to save the gerbil," Eric Tomaszewski told the bemused doctors in the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital. Tomaszewski and his homosexual partner, Andrew "Kiki" Farnum, had been admitted for emergency treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong.
"I pushed a cardboard toilet paper tube up his rectum and slipped Ragout, our gerbil, in," he explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out 'Armageddon,' my cue that he'd had reached nirvana, so to speak. I tried to retrieve Raggot but he simply would not come out, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him." At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman desribed what happened next.
"The match ignited a pocket of intestinal methane gas in Kiki's colon. Flames shot out the tube, ignited Mr. Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers, causing it to scurry further up Kiki's colon, which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out of the cardboard tube like a cannonball."
Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.
Sadly, Ragout the gerbil did not survive the incident.
4. Lightning Date(1998) A pre-med student from the University of Arizona was hoping to score with his date on a Friday night. To put the woman in the mood, he drove her to a lonesome spot on Mount Lemmon, which overlooks the city of Tucson, Arizona. They walked to an open knoll and admired the city lights.
Overcome by the romantic locale, the lissome lass succumbed to his pleas. Soon they tossed their clothes off, made a bed of their garments, and began to make love. The heavy storm clouds rolling overhead mingled with the low rumble of thunder inside them. The excited lovers never looked up to see the charred remains of trees on the knoll.
Their idyllic clearing was a hotbed of electrical activity that night. With a blinding light, a bolt of lightning struck the high point on the knoll, which happened to be the pre-med student's ass, and sought the path of least resistance straight down. Incredibly, he survived, albeit in excruciating pain.
The heat of the bolt had fused together flesh and latex so that the two lovers were now stuck together. The woman unfortunately did not survive the lightning strike. When the student looked down into the vacant eyes of his girlfriend and realized she was dead, his immediate repulsion caused him to jerk away from her. When he found that he couldn't, a wave of pain and nausea made him vomit into the girl's face and open mouth.
Heaving only caused more pain and illness. Finally he passed out. Attracted by the smell, a bear found its way to the lovers and began to lick semi-digested pizza and buffalo wings from the dead girl's face. The student roused from his exhaustion. When he saw the bear, he realized that there was nothing he could do but lay silently in fear.
To his horror, the bear became dissatisfied with just a lick and started to eat the girl; loudly crunching her facial bones inches from his ear. The bear also sampled the student, scraping the back of his skull with its teeth, before moving on.
At 11:35AM, a group of camping girl scouts arrived at the lover's tryst, where the pre-med student's car was parked. Minutes later, three screaming girls discovered the student, who had regained consciousness several times in the night and had managed to drag himself and the partially-eaten girl several meters towards the road.
Doctors managed to separate the student from the corpse.
According to a hospital source, his penis resembled "a small piece of cauliflower" in its flaccid state. The first hint of arousal resulted in so much pain that the student was unable and unwilling to achieve an erection. It is doubtful that it will ever again function in a procreatory sense.
5. Unfortunate IndeedThis guy pushed his motorcycle from the patio into his living room, where he began to clean the engine with some rags and a bowl of gasoline, all in the comfort of his own home. When he finished, he sat on the motorcycle and decided to give his bike a quick start and make sure everything was still OK. Unfortunately, the bike started in gear, and crashed through the glass patio door with him still clinging to the handlebars.
His wife had been working in the kitchen. She came running at the fearful sound, and found him crumpled on the patio, badly cut from the shards of broken glass. She called 911, and the paramedics carried the unfortunate man to the Emergency Room.
Later that afternoon, after many stitches had pulled her husband back together, the wife brought him home and put him to bed. She cleaned up the mess in the living room, and dumped the bowl of gasoline in the toilet.
Shortly thereafter, her husband woke up, lit a cigarette, and went into the bathroom for a much-needed relief break. He sat down and tossed the cigarette into the toilet, which promptly exploded because the wife had not flushed the gasoline away. The explosion blew the man through the bathroom door.
The wife heard a loud explosion and the terrible sound of her husband's screams. She ran into the hall and found her husband lying on the floor with his trousers blown away and burns on his buttocks. The wife again ran to the phone and called for an ambulance.
The same two paramedics were dispatched to the scene. They loaded the husband on the stretcher and began carrying him to the street. One of them asked the wife how the injury had occurred. When she told them, they began laughing so hard that they dropped the stretcher, and broke the guy's collarbone.