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This will lift your day if you're having a good one.
Funny Story- Could almost be true.
At the 1994 annual awards dinner given
by the American Association
for
Forensic science, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his
audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre
death.
Here is the story:
"On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of
Ronald
Opus
and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound of the head. The
decedent had jumped from the top of a ten-story building
intending to
commit suicide (he left a note indicating his despondency). As he
fell
past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast
through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter
nor
the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the
eighth floor level to protect some window washers and that Opus
would
not have been able to complete his suicide anyway because of this."
"Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "a person who
sets out to commit
suicide ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not
be
what he intended. That Opus was shot on the way to certain death
nine
stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death
from
suicide to homicide. But the fact that his suicidal intent would
not
have been successful caused the medical examiner to feel that he
had
homicide on his hands. "The room on the ninth floor whence
the
shotgun
blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They
were
arguing and he was threatening her with the shotgun. He was so
upset
that, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife
and
the pellets went through a window, striking Opus. "When one
intends
to
kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty
of
the murder of subject B. When confronted with this charge, the
old
man
and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun
was
loaded. The old man said it was his long-standing habit to
threaten
his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder
her
- therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That
is,
the gun had been accidentally loaded.
"The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw
the old
couple's son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to
the
fatal incident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her
son's
financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his
father
to
use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the
expectation
that his father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one
of
murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.
There was an exquisite twist. "Further investigation
revealed that
the
son had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his
attempt
to engineer his mother's murder. This led him, Ronald Opus, to
jump
off the ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by a
shotgun
blast through a ninth story window.
"The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide."