Muraka Jenny Vearncombe, 42, was decapitated by a piece of a metal pipe flung by a tractor-pulled lawnmower as she walked to work in Townsville, Australia.[238]
Mike Edwards, 62, cellist and a founding member of the band Electric Light Orchestra, died when a large round bale of hay rolled down a hill and collided with the van he was driving.[239][240][241]
Edward Archbold, 32, of West Palm Beach, Florida, choked on “arthropod body parts” during a cockroach-eating contest.[245][246]
Erica Marshall
2012
Erica Marshall, a 28-year-old British veterinarian in Ocala, Florida, died when the horse she was treating in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber kicked the wall, released a spark from its horseshoes and triggered an explosion.[247][248][249]
Ilda Vitor Maciel
28 September 2012
88-year-old Ilda Vitor Maciel died in a Brazilian hospital in Barra Mansa (south of state of Rio de Janeiro), allegedly as a result of nursing technicians injecting soup through her IV drip instead of her feeding tube.[250]
Elisa Lam, from Vancouver, British Columbia, was missing for several weeks before being found dead in a large water tank on the roof of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, after guests complained about the taste of the water.[251]
Takuya Nagaya
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.”[252]
An unnamed Belarusian fisherman, 60, bled to death after being bitten by a beaver which he had tried to grab in order to have his picture taken with it.[254][255]
João Maria de Souza
2013
João Maria de Souza, 45, was crushed in his bed by a cow falling through the roof of his home in Caratinga, Minas Gerais in Southeast Brazil. The cow had climbed on top of the house from a steep hillside behind it. Both the cow and de Souza’s wife (who had been in bed next to him) were unharmed.[256]
Denver Lee St. Clair
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.[257][258]
Kendrick Johnson, 17, was discovered trapped upside down in a rolled-up gym mat in his high school gymnasium. Police originally concluded he had climbed in to retrieve a shoe and became trapped, but the case was later reopened as a possible homicide.[259][260][261][262][263]
The two young brothers, aged 4 and 6, were killed by an African rock python during a sleepover at their friend’s home in New Brunswick, Canada. The large snake had escaped its enclosure in the apartment and slithered through ducts until it fell through the ceiling of the bedroom where they slept. Though it suffocated the children it did not attempt to eat them.[265][266]
Hayato Tsuruta
2013
Hayato Tsuruta, 28, from Japan, with intellectual disabilities, ran away from his residential facility and went to a supermarket. There he consumed so many doughnuts displayed that he choked to death.[267][268]
Heval Yıldırım
2014
Heval Yıldırım, 13, of Turkey was killed when a sacrificial goat bought for Eid al-Adha jumped off the roof over a protective fence and fell onto him. Yıldırım’s father placed the goat on the roof of the building where he lived because he could not find another suitable place to keep it.[269]
Christophe de Margerie, an oil executive, was killed when his corporate jet collided with a snowplow reportedly driven by a drunk driver.[270][271]
Peng Fan
2014
Peng Fan, a chef in Foshan, China, was bitten by a cobra‘s severed head, which he had cut off 20 minutes earlier while preparing a soup.[272][273]
Peter Biaksangzuala
2014
Peter Biaksangzuala, an Indian association football player, died after sustaining spinal cord injuries while awkwardly landing a somersault celebrating a goal.[274]
Charmayne Maxwell
2015
Charmayne Maxwell, a member of American R&B group Brownstone, died after falling backward while holding a wine glass. During the fall the wine glass shattered on the ground behind Maxwell’s head, and the shards pierced her neck, causing profuse bleeding.[275]
Chelsea Ake-Salvacion
2015
Chelsea Ake-Salvacion, 24, an employee of a Henderson, Nevadasalon, was suffocated while using a cryotherapy machine set to the wrong level, which eliminated the oxygen in the chamber.[276][277]
Lee Jane
2015
Lee Jane, 57, an English lorry driver, was run over by his own skip lorry as it careened towards a hospital building, after failing to engage the handbrake.[278][279]
Ravi Subramanian
2015
Ravi Subramanian, an Air India technician, was sucked into an aircraft’s jet engines.[280][281]
Stephen Whinfrey
2015
Stephen Whinfrey, 50, became trapped and asphyxiated when rabbiting near Doncaster, England, after his head became stuck down a rabbit hole.[282]
V. Kamaraj
2016
V. Kamaraj, a 40-year-old Indian bus driver, was claimed by local Indian newspapers to have been killed by a meteorite which left a two-foot (61 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“.[283][284][285][286]
Lottie Michelle Belk
2016
Lottie Michelle Belk, 55, was fatally stabbed in the chest by a beach umbrella blown by a strong wind.[287] Wind speeds at the time reached 20–25 miles per hour (32–40 km/h).[288][289]
Caleb Schwab, 10, was decapitated when he was ejected from his raft on Verrückt, a 168-foot-tall (51 m) water slide.[290]
Irma Bule
2016
Irma Bule, 29, an Indonesiandangdut singer who performed with live snakes, died during a concert after being bitten by a king cobra and refusing treatment.[291][292]
Anton Yelchin, 27, an 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.[293][294]
Unknown
2016
A seven-year-old girl died after being struck by a stone thrown by an elephant from its enclosure at the zoo at Rabat, Morocco.[295][296]
Kristopher Moules and Timothy Gilliam Jr.
2016
Kristopher Moules, 25, a Corrections Officer and Timothy Gilliam Jr., 27, an out of county inmate being housed at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, fell to their deaths after an altercation between the two caused them to slam into the exterior of the fifth floor elevator doors. Despite the elevator having its up-to-date working credentials, upon impact of the men into the elevator doors, the doors popped open, causing the two men to fall five flights down the elevator shaft to their deaths. The county declared CO Moules’ death a homicide and declared Gilliam’ death an accident.[297]
Ten people
2016
On 21 November 2016, a powerful southerly change in Melbourne, Australia, resulted in the death of 10 asthmatic people who succumbed to respiratory failure.[298] This was due to a stark wind (60 km/hour) that distributed ryegrasspollen into the moist air, rupturing them into very fine specks, small enough particles to enter people’s lungs.[299]
Charlie Holt
2017
Charlie Holt, 5, was killed at the Sun Dial Restaurant, a rotating restaurant at the top of Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia; his head was caught in a small space between the rotating and non-rotating sections.[300]
Akbar Salubiro, a 25-year-old man, was killed and swallowed by a reticulated python in Indonesia, in the first fully confirmed case of a snake swallowing an adult human.[301] A second case in Indonesia happened the following year, when another reticulated snake killed and swallowed an adult woman in her garden.[302]
Robert Dreyer
2017
Robert Dreyer, 89, drowned on his birthday after crashing his car into a fire hydrant. Dreyer successfully stepped out of his car, but was swallowed by a sinkhole likely created as a result of the destruction of the fire hydrant and subsequent water pressure.[303]
Rebecca Burger, 33, a fitness blogger and model, died after a pressurized canister of whipped cream exploded and struck her in the chest. The injury caused Burger to go into cardiac arrest.[305]
Hidr Korkmaz
2017
Hidr Korkmaz, 42, a Turkish-Dutch drug dealer and informant, died while fishing when he threw his fish hook into an electric wire. Though he was a witness in the case against Dutch criminal Willem Holleeder, he was not important to the case and authorities treated it as an accident.[306]
Elizabeth Isherwood
2017
Elizabeth Isherwood, 60, 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. Why she had shut herself in the cupboard in the first place remained a mystery.[307]
Rajesh Maru
2018
Rajesh Maru, 32, died at Nair Hospital in Mumbai after carrying a metal oxygen tank into a room housing an MRI scanner; the machine’s magnetic field pulled Maru in, pinning his hand and breaching the tank, releasing liquid oxygen.[308] A hospital employee had asked Maru to transport the tank, as Maru’s hospitalized relative would need it during her scan.[308][309] An autopsy showed that Maru died instantly from pneumothorax brought on by exposure to very high levels of leaked oxygen.[308] Conflicting reports state two or three hospital employees were arrested for negligence.[310][308] The Maharashtra state government compensated Maru’s family 500,000 rupees.[310]
Elaine Herzberg, a 49-year-old woman in 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.[311][312]
On 10 April 2018, 16-year-old high-school student Kyle Plush died after becoming trapped in his Honda Odyssey, which was in his school’s parking lot in Cincinnati, Ohio. Attempting to reach his tennis equipment, Plush leaned over the third row of seats into the trunk. When the row of seats “squashed his chest”, Plush became pinned and later died. During the incident, the teen called 9-1-1 twice, by using Apple iPhone‘s Siri voice-activation. Responding to the 9-1-1 calls, police were not able to find Plush; he was eventually discovered in the vehicle by his father about six hours later.[314]
Jennifer Riordan
2018
Jennifer Riordan, 43, a passenger aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, died after debris from an engine failure struck and destroyed the window she was sitting next to. She was partially sucked out through the window, but was pulled back into the aircraft and was given CPR until an emergency landing was made. She died upon arrival at hospital with her cause of death determined to be blunt trauma to the head, neck and torso.[315][316]
Hildegard Whiting
2018
Hildegard Whiting, 77, died of suffocation from the carbon dioxide vapors produced by four dry ice coolers in a Dippin’ Dots delivery car.[317][318] The car was borrowed by the deliveryman’s wife to take Whiting home.[317][318]
John A. Korody
2018
John A. Korody, 61, died after falling into a vat of cooking oil and grease while standing on a grate in Orange County, Florida, near Orlando. Co-workers were unable to rescue him due to the strong fumes.[319]
Sam Ballard
2018
Sam Ballard, 29, died from angiostrongyliasis after eating a garden slug as a dare eight years earlier.[320]
Linda Goldbloom
2018
Linda Goldbloom, 79, died after being hit by a foul ball at Dodger Stadium. Goldbloom’s death was the first in nearly 50 years directly attributed to a foul ball.[321]
On 5 April 2019, Darren Hickey, a 51-year-old wedding planner from Horwich, England, died after eating a scalding-hot fishcake at a wedding. The cause of death was ruled to be asphyxiation. The pathologist who performed Hickey’s autopsy called the case “extremely rare” and likened Hickey’s symptoms to those of victims who have inhaled smoke during house fires.[323]
Elena “Lena” Struthers-Gardner, 60, was carrying a mason-jar style drinking glass with a screw-top lid in her kitchen when she collapsed. The 10-inch stainless steel straw entered her left eye socket and pierced her brain.[326][327]
Yulia Sharkom
8 September 2019
Yulia Sharkom, 21, was trying to grab her 2-year-old daughter from her car through the half-open front seat window in Belarus when her neck was jammed by the window after her daughter pressed the automatic switch. She died eight days later, having suffered asphyxia leading to brain damage due to the accidental window garroting.[328]
Michael Kosanovich
6 December 2019
Michael Kosanovich, 21, was crushed to death by a 2002 Lexus IS300s automobile after its owner started it by remote control. The car rolled forward, and he was pinned between two vehicles.[329][330]