List of Unusual Deaths

January 1990 

 Daniel John O’Brien, 31, committed suicide by jumping into the engines of a British Airways 747 Jumbo 

1993

Garry Hoy, a lawyer in Toronto fell to his death from the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre while demonstrating to a group of visitors that the building’s windows were “unbreakable”. Hoy threw himself against the window, which did not break but popped out of its frame. 

October 1998

Bena Tshadi (football team) 

An entire football team of 11 in Eastern Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo, were fatally struck by lightning while playing. The other team left the scene unharmed. 

March 2001

Bernd Brandes, a German engineer from Berlin, was willingly slaughtered so that he could be butchered and eaten by cannibal Armin Meiwes. Brandes had responded to an internet advertisement which Meiwes had placed for this purpose. In prison, Meiwes later became a vegetarian.

2005

Kenneth Pinyan died from injuries caused by anal sex with a stallion 

2007

Humberto Hernandez, a 24-year-old Oakland, California resident, was killed after being struck in the face by an airborne fire hydrant while walking. A passing car had struck the fire hydrant and the water pressure shot the hydrant at Hernandez with enough force to kill him 

2008

Padre Baloeiro or Padre do Balão (“Balloon Priest” in Portuguese), was a Brazilian Catholic priest and skydiver from Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, who on April 20, 2008, participated in a fundraising charity event for the Pastoral Rodoviária de Paranaguá (a religious entity that provides assistance to road travelers). For that he wanted to break a record of an American who had flown for 19 hours. Then fully equipped and with a total of 1000 balloons he flew to beat the record, reaching an altitude of 6,000 meters (or 19,700 ft). However, his balloon flight started to go wrong, and the priest ended up losing contact with the authorities (his last contact being with the military police near São Francisco do Sul, Santa Catarina, Brazil). Two months later, on July 4, in the Atlantic Ocean, the members of an oil extraction vessel 100km from Macaé, Rio de Janeiro find the lower part of a body, which appeared to be that of a male person. On July 29, DNA tests were done with the help of the priest’s brother and his DNA. To the shock of the parish and the Brazilian population, the lower part of the body belonged to Padre do Balão 

2008

David Phyall, 50, the last resident in a block of flats due to be demolished in Bishopstoke, near Southampton, Hampshire, England, decapitated himself with a chainsaw to highlight the injustice of being forced to move out 

2009 (body discovered 2019)

Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada, a 25-year-old supermarket employee from Council Bluffs, Iowa, is believed to have fallen into the 18-inch gap between a cooler and a wall and become trapped. His body was not discovered for almost ten years, when the cooler was finally moved 

2009

A 14-year-old boy from Jiaozhou, Shandong, China was killed when the pneumatic cylinder in his office chair exploded 

2012

Edward Archbold, 32, of West Palm Beach, Florida, choked on “arthropod body parts” during a cockroach-eating contest 

2013

Takuya Nagaya, 23, from Japan, started to slither on the floor and claimed he had become a snake. Takuya died after his father spent the next two days head-butting and biting him “to drive [out] the snake that had possessed him 

2013

Denver Lee St. Clair was asphyxiated by an “atomic wedgie” administered by his stepson during a fight. After St. Clair had been knocked unconscious, the elastic band from his torn underwear was pulled over his head and stretched around his neck, strangling him 

2018

Sam Ballard, 29, died from angiostrongyliasis after eating a garden slug as a dare eight years earlier 

2020

Sergio Millán, 59, was killed when the ceiling of his flat in Torreforta, Tarragona (Spain) collapsed on him. The collapse was caused by a heavy metal plate that flew 3 km propelled by an explosion from a factory in the outskirts of the town and eventually crashed into the flat 

2020

Three people died of carbon dioxide suffocation and drowning when 25 kg of dry ice was thrown into an indoors swimming pool at a sauna party in Moscow to create a layer of thick white fog over water surface, which, inadvertently, displaced oxygen