Morbid as it may seem but eventually all of us will come to pass yet there are some who did go the unique or bizarre way. These are just some of these unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history and noted as being unusual by multiple sources.
21st Century
2000s
Francis Pete Tovey
The 81-year-old built a device that consisted of a jigsaw power tool attached to a .22 semi-automatic handgun containing four bullets. He then activated it, which fired multiple shots at his head, killing himself. Tovey built the device after downloading suicide plans on the Internet. Tovey, who originated from England and was living in Burleigh Heads, Australia at the time, left a note stating that he was struggling after pressure from relatives to move from his £450,000 home to a retirement home.
Date of Death: March 18, 2008
2010s
2010s
Stephen Whinfrey
The 50-year old became trapped and asphyxiated when rabbiting near Doncaster, England, after his head became stuck down a rabbit hole.
Date of Death: January 2015
Maxee
The member of American R&B group Brownstone, died after falling backward while holding a wine glass. During the fall, the glass shattered on the ground behind her head, and the shards pierced her neck, causing profuse bleeding.
Date of Death: February 28, 2015
Stephen Woytack
The 74-year old was decorating his family's grave plot at St. Joseph's Cemetery in Throop, Pennsylvania, for Easter with his wife when the tombstone of his mother-in-law toppled over, pinning him underneath and crushing him to death. The stone had supposedly been dislodged when the previously frozen ground was thawed by the early spring temperatures. Woytack was buried in a plot directly in front of the tombstone that killed him.
Date of Death: March 30, 2015
Randy Llanes
The 47-year old fisherman from Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, was killed by a swordfish. He had harpooned the fish and jumped into the water to retrieve it, but the swordfish impaled him in the chest.
Date of Death: May 29, 2015
Jaylon Rippy
The five-year old was killed by a leaping sturgeon while she was boating with her family near Fanning Springs, Florida. Her mother and brother were also injured and needed facial reconstruction surgery.
Date of Death: July 2, 2015
Chelsea Ake-Salvacion
The 24-year old beauty salon employee in Henderson, Nevada, was suffocated while using a cryotherapy machine set to the wrong level, which eliminated the oxygen in the chamber.
Date of Death: October 2015
Ravi Subramanian
The Air India technician was sucked into an aircraft's jet engine.
Date of Death: December 5, 2015
V. Kamaraj
The 40-year old Indian bus driver was claimed by local newspapers to have been killed by a meteorite which left a two-foot (60 cm) crater, although officials from NASA oppose that view, saying that the most likely explanation was a land-based explosion. According to a preliminary report by the National College Instrumentation Facility (NCIF) in Trichy, a scanning electron microscope (SEM) study on the evidence of the samples retrieved from the campus in Vellore, from where the blast occurred, showed "the presence of carbonaceous chondrites".
Date of Death: 2016
Irma Bule
The 29-year old Indonesian dangdut singer who performed with live snakes, died during a concert after being bitten by a king cobra and refusing treatment.
Date of Death: April 4, 2016
Lottie Michelle Belk
The 55-year old was fatally stabbed in the chest by a beach umbrella blown by a strong wind in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Wind speeds at the time reached 20–25 miles per hour (32–40 km/h).
Date of Death: June 6, 2016
Lane Graves
The two-year-old boy from Nebraska was on vacation and playing on the beach at Seven Seas Lagoon around 9 p.m. at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, just outside of Orlando, Florida. While he was playing, an alligator approached and dragged him under the water. Graves's body was found nearby the next day, intact and apparently drowned.
Date of Death: June 14, 2016
Anton Yelchin
The 27-year old American actor known for portraying Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek reboot movie series, was found pinned between his car and a brick wall. His driveway was on an incline and his car was found running and in neutral. The manufacturer had recalled the car make in April 2016, for concerns about its gearshift design that could cause rollaway incidents, but the software patch to repair the vehicles did not reach dealers until the week of Yelchin's death.
Date of Death: June 19, 2016
Kristopher Moules and Timothy Gilliam Jr.
Moules, a 25-year old correctional officer, and Gilliam, a 27-year old out-of-county inmate being housed at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, fell to their deaths after an altercation between them caused them to slam into the exterior of the fifth floor elevator doors. Despite the elevator having its up-to-date working credentials, the door popped open on impact, causing the men to fall five flights down the shaft to their deaths. The county declared Moules' death a homicide and declared Gilliam's an accident.
Date of Death: July 18, 2016
Unknown Girl
A seven-year-old girl died after being struck by a stone thrown by an elephant from its enclosure at the zoo in Rabat, Morocco.
Date of Death: July 26, 2016
Caleb Schwab
The 10-year old was decapitated when he was ejected from his raft on Verrückt, a 168-foot-tall (51 m) water slide at Schlitterbahn Kansas City.
Date of Death: August 7, 2016
Julio Macías González
The 17-year old from Mexico City, died from a cerebrovascular accident caused by embolus formed on a neck hickey
Date of Death: August 26, 2016
Ten People
A powerful southerly change in Melbourne, Australia, resulted in the death of 10 asthmatic people who died from respiratory failure. This was due to a stark 60-kilometre-per-hour (37 mph) wind that distributed ryegrass pollen into the moist air, rupturing them into very fine specks small enough to enter people's lungs.
Date of Death: November 21, 2016
Charlie Holt
The five-year old was killed at the Sun Dial, a rotating restaurant at the top of Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, when his head was caught in a small space between the rotating and non-rotating sections.
Date of Death: 2017
Akbar Salubiro
The 25-year old was killed and swallowed by a reticulated python in West Sulawesi, Indonesia, in the first fully confirmed case of a snake swallowing an adult human. A second case happened there the following year, when another reticulated python killed and swallowed a woman in her garden.
Date of Death: March 2017
Robert Dreyer
The Florida resident drowned on his 89th birthday after he crashed his car into a fire hydrant and was then swallowed by the sinkhole created by the broken water line which had fed the hydrant.
Date of Death: May 10, 2017
Debra Bedard
The 58-year old died after falling from a golf cart onto shards of wine glasses that had broken in her hands in Calaveras County, California.
Date of Death: June 2, 2017
Rebecca Burger
The 33-year old French fitness blogger and model, died after a Whipped-cream charger exploded and struck her in the chest. The injury caused her to go into cardiac arrest as a result of commotio cordis.
Date of Death: June 18, 2017
Jasmine Beever
The 16-year old from Skegness, England, died of peritonitis brought about by Rapunzel syndrome. She had a long-time habit of chewing and swallowing her own hair (trichophagia) which formed a hairball in her stomach, leading to an infection in her abdomen damaging her vital organs.
Date of Death: September 7, 2017
Elizabeth Isherwood
The 60-year old walked naked into an airing cupboard at the villa she was renting and shut the door. When she tried to leave, part of the door handle broke off in her hand. She dug into the wall in an attempt to escape, but struck and burst a pipe, which sprayed water into the cupboard and caused her eventual death by hypothermia. She was found several days later.
Date of Death: September 2017
Raildo Matias Santos
The 49-year old drowned in a bucket of water in Jaguaquara, Brazil. Santos, who was intoxicated, attempted to fetch a 20-litre (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 US gal) bucket of water, tripped, and fell in a kneeling position. He was epileptic.
Date of Death: October 22, 2017
Hidr Korkmaz
The 42-year old Turkish-Dutch drug dealer and informant, died when he threw his fishhook into an electrical cable while fishing somewhere in Eastern Europe. Though he was a witness in the case against Dutch criminal Willem Holleeder, he was not considered a crucial asset by authorities, who treated his death as an accident.
Date of Death: November 12, 2017
Rajesh Maru
The 32-year old died at Nair Hospital in Mumbai after carrying a metal oxygen tank into a room housing an MRI scanner. The magnetic field pulled him in with the tank which pinned his hand and released liquid oxygen. He died of pneumothorax from inhaling liquid oxygen.
Date of Death: January 28, 2018
Ateef Rafiq
The 24-year old died from cardiac arrest in a movie theater in Birmingham, England, while looking for his dropped mobile phone. His head became wedged under the electronic footrest of a seat.
Date of Death: March 16, 2018
Elaine Herzberg
The 49-year old from Tempe, Arizona, died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, as she crossed the road, in what was reported to be the first death of a pedestrian struck by a self-driving car on public roads. In response to the fatal accident, Uber suspended self-driving car tests in all U.S. cities.
Date of Death: March 18, 2018
Kyle Plush
The 16-year old died from asphyxia after becoming trapped in his Honda Odyssey, which was in his school's parking lot in Cincinnati, Ohio. Attempting to reach his tennis equipment, he leaned over the third row of seats into the trunk. When the seats "squashed his chest", he became pinned and later died. During the incident, he called 9-1-1 twice, by using his smartphone's voice assistant. Responding to the calls, the police were not able to find him; he was eventually discovered dead in the vehicle by his father about six hours later.
Date of Death: April 10, 2018
Photo Sources:
Wikipedia
Daily Guardian UK
