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Enron Mail |
Who knows if this is true or not, but it is bizarre.
__________________________________________________________ Subject: Darwinian Kharma, Very weird (A true story from Associated Press, by Kurt Westervelt) Stick with this.....it's worth it! This is the strangest thing I've ever heard. The series of events that had to have taken place in order for this to happen are astounding! At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS president Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death: On March 23, 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide. He left a note to that effect indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the dead man was aware that a safety net had been installed just below at the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he planned. "Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "A person who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds even though the mechanism might not be what he intended" is still defined as committing suicide. That Mr. Opus was shot during what would apparently have been an unsuccessful suicide attempt because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands. The room on the ninth floor where the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously, and he was threatening her with a shotgun. The man was so upset when he pulled the trigger that he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Mr. Opus as he passed by outside. When someone, intending to kill person "A," kills person "B" instead; someone is still guilty of murder. When confronted with a murder charge the old man and his wife were both adamant; they both said they thought the shotgun was unloaded. 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 Mr. 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 about six weeks prior to the fatal accident. 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 reverts back to one of murder on the part of the son. Now comes the final twist! Further investigation revealed that the couple's son was in fact, Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over his failed attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by the shotgun blast passing through the ninth floor window. The son had actually murdered himself so the medical examiner closed the case and declared it a suicide.
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