Los Angeles Man Cruelly Betrayed by Ritual Animal Sacrifice
A man who was thrown from his car in a traffic accident and died after landing on a freeway sign was doomed by the least effective ritual animal sacrifice you can even imagine, reports the Los Angeles Times.
20-year-old Richard Pananian of Burbank apparently overcame some serious, unspecified health concerns, and his family decided the thing to do was get down with some old-timey animal sacrifice action to protect him from harm. Specifically, the family performed a matagh, in which a lamb is sacrificed to God for health, or forgiveness, or, in this case, “to protect him from harm and evil,” according to the New York Daily News.
That was October 25. On the morning of October 30, fate’s cruel sense of humor took charge:
He was driving southbound on the 5 Freeway just north of California 134 when his Ford Fiesta rear-ended a pickup truck and overturned, said Officer Edgar Figueroa, a California Highway Patrol spokesman. The CHP said Pananian was not wearing a seat belt.
Minutes before the crash the Highway Patrol reportedly received a phone call about Pananian’s Fiesta driving erratically. Pananian—who, according to family, always wore his seatbelt—was not buckled in at the time.
Pananian, who was a car aficionado, had even installed a racing safety harness for his driver’s seat, his cousin said.
Pananian was ejected from the car when it rolled, eventually landing on a freeway sign high above the road. Rescue crews needed a ladder to remove the body from the scene.
You’d like to think a lamb sacrifice would buy a person more than five days of protection, you know? Pananian’s cousin, Armen Kardashian, agrees:
“I find it ironic that 5 days after this offering to God, not only did God choose to take this young man’s life, but decided to make such a spectacle out of it,” Kardashian wrote. “If God works in mysterious ways his way remains a mystery to me and has crushed this family as a whole.”
Pananian’s family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds due to “unexpected financial burdens.” You have chuckled at the circumstances of this young man’s demise. You know what to do.
