A 49-year-old man employed at an American Apparel factory in Garden Grove, California, was "crushed by a circular knitting machine," according to a report on the Orange County coroner's website.
Four concertgoers at Belgium's Pukkelpop Music Festival lost their lives today when the festival's main stage collapsed in a strong storm. This is the third such incident this summer, after storms took out stages in Ottawa and Indiana, the latter killing five people. Either the stages are getting weaker, or the storms are getting stronger.
The most tragic American image of 2011 will undoubtedly be that of 6-year-old Cooper Stone, looking down from the stands at his father, 39-year-old firefighter Shannon Stone, who had fallen to his death trying to catch his son a baseball at a Texas Rangers game. Now the two will be immortalized in bronze, in a memorial set to be installed next season outside the park's home plate gate. It's meant to be both a remembrance of Stone and a tribute to all of the game's fans — but man, that's going to be one seriously solemn statue. [AP, photo via NGottwald's Flickr]
Five people were killed on Saturday night when strong winds caused a stage at the Indiana state fair to collapse, minutes before the band Sugarland was scheduled to perform.
Think of a truly horrible way to die, and then think about this: A 51-year-old airplane maintenance worker in New Zealand was performing "a very routine procedure" on a a C-130 Hercules when he was sucked into the engine and killed. The propellers were not attached and the engine was on a stand at the time. The man, Miles Hunter, worked for a subsidiary of Air New Zealand, according to ONE News.
Beach days are the best! It's nothing but taking in the sun, splashing around in the water, and digging six-foot pits in the sand. Um, huh? While I'm pretty sure most people don't spend their time at the beach digging massive trenches in the sand—what are you, digging to China?—to each his own. But if you happen to be the sort of person who enjoys this activity, please know that these holes are extremely dangerous and may collapse in on you, as 17-year-old Orange County resident Matt Mina will tell you.
The Telegraph is reporting that Mr. Bean, officially known as Rowan Atkinson, has crashed his $1 million, very purple, and apparently very fast McLaren F1 sports car in Britain. Thankfully he's okay after suffering a minor shoulder injury, but his car burst into flames after slamming into a tree. But seriously, look at that thing.
A quadriplegic skydiver fell 18,000 feet to his death in Salmon, Idaho, because he wasn't able to deploy his parachute.
Leanne Suter, a reporter for KABC in Los Angeles, was shot in the hand with a BB gun yesterday while doing a segment on weather. We can't find video of the incident itself, but apparently Leanne is such a bad-ass that "viewers could not tell" she was shot.
Jeopardy host Alex Trebek arrived at the National Geographic World Championship, which he was hosting, on crutches today. Apparently he fell while "chasing a burglar" at 2:30 am at his San Francisco hotel and snapped his Achilles tendon. Hm. I'll take improbable explanations for $800. Also, what is: ouch. Jeopardy jokes! [ABC 7, photo via Getty]
If you're going to fail your driving test, you might as well go out with a bang — and a crash, directly into the Department of Motor Vehicles. That's what happened to a male driving student (not the one pictured) who rammed his car into the side of the Roseville, Ca., DMV on Monday evening when he accidentally pressed the accelerator instead of the brake.
A South African man spent about 24 hours in a morgue this weekend. Not, like, hanging out! No, as a dead body.
All told, things could have turned out a whole lot worse for Dez Heal, a 13-year-old boy from Lynchburg, Virginia, who was playing a game of ninja with his friends when he accidentally fell onto the bamboo spear he was using as a sword. The spear went through his neck, but avoided all major arteries, and when his father saw what he had done, he "calmly and collectedly" dialed 911. (That's actually the part of the story I have the hardest time processing.) It took five hours in an emergency room, but they finally got the splinter out and sewed Dez back up again. Yup, good as new.
A mocked-up taxi used in the Canadian version of the Discovery Channel game show Cash Cab struck and killed a Vancouver pedestrian on Friday night.
Michael Raper, a 26-year-old employee of meat processing company Bar S, died this week after falling into a meat grinder. Is there a way that this story could be more horrible? Yes, yes there is:
If I lost a leg 15 hours ago to a locomotive, I can tell you this: I would not be chilling in a hospital room, casually describing the bummer for reporters as if it were a story about misplacing my favorite hash pipe. I would be screaming. Pretty loudly, I'm sure. Or drugged unconscious. But not James Piles! James is a kind-bud-toking, one-legged warrior.
A 54-year-old man from New Jersey was electrocuted to death on Sunday after lightning struck the tree next to which he was standing. The last thing Stephen Rooney told his family before he wandered away from a barbecue to smoke a cigar, MSNBC reports, was, "Don't worry guys, lightning never strikes twice." He was referring to an incident from 48 years earlier, when Rooney's father was killed by a bolt of lightning while fishing. So what can we learn from this tragedy? That lightning doesn't care about truisms! It's lightning. It strikes wherever it wants to strike. [MSNBC]
You're either a rollercoaster person, or you're not. I thought I was one, once, until I rode something called "X" at Magic Mountain that spit fire at me and jerked me around so violently, I actually thought I might not make it. It took a photo at the most terrifying part, and the look on my face is, quite simply, the look of a person who thinks they are about to die.
