“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
Are there some people who are too dumb to live?
It’s an interesting, if not much asked, question.
Certainly people do get killed in unusual ways. Of course that is not always their fault. Sometimes they are the victims of circumstances beyond their control. No one can plan for the drunken idiot who slams his car into another. Nor should we live our lives in fear of such things. Take as much care as necessary without impacting on your own life and enjoyment is the best we can do. And usually that is more than enough to get us by.
Back to the initial question.
I think there is a lot of evidence to show that there are indeed some people who are just too dumb to live. There’s a thing called the Darwin Awards that every year highlights some of the people who have, as they put it, strengthened the gene pool by doing away with themselves under the stupidest of circumstances. Some of them are very amusing indeed and I hope to feature other examples in this blog from time to time.
This one is about two people meeting their end in a peculiar, and for the rest of us, funny way.
It happened in the little town (called a city) of George, in Grant County, Washington. As well as being a play on the President’s name, George, Washington, with a population of little over 500, is famous for the similarly sounding Gorge Amphitheatre. This is a 20,000+ seat concert venue located above the Columbia River, that offers lawn-terrace seating and “concert friendly weather”.
Actually it is considered to be one of the premier and most scenic concert locations in the US, and some say even the world. It has been the host to artists such as The Who, David Bowie, Coldplay, and Pearl Jam, the latter even releasing a box set album featuring their entire performances from 2005 and 2006.
However the group that caused the trouble for the two intrepid zeros who are the subject of today’s blog post was Metallica. When they were playing at The Gorge, Robert Uhlenake (24) and his friend, Ormond D. Young (27) decided they wanted to go along.
However, unable to get any tickets for the sold out gig the two instead decided to stay in a nearby parking lot and drink. By the time the show had started they had made their way through eighteen beers.
That was when they did something that stupid people, especially drunk stupid people, should never do.
Yes, they hit upon an idea.
And that idea was to scale the seven foot wooden security fence around the perimeter of the site and sneak in. The rest of the plan involved moving their truck up to the edge of the fence, get on top of it and simply jump over the fence.
So far, so good.
Then they decided that Young would go over first and assist Uhlenake later.
Again, so far, so good.
But what they had not figured into their plan was that, while the fence was seven feet high on the parking lot side, there was a twenty-three foot drop on the other side.
Young, who weighed around 255 lbs and was quite inebriated, jumped up and over the fence and promptly fell about half the twenty-three foot distance before a large tree branch broke his fall AND his left forearm.
Not content with that he also managed to get his shorts caught on the branch.
There’s a kind of a rule in life, I don’t know whose it is (it’s not Murphy’s, maybe I’ll claim it for fasab if no one else has it), that when things start to go wrong they have a tendency to keep on going from bad to worse. So it was for young Mr Young.
He was now in a lot of pain and his broken arm made it impossible for him to extricate himself and his shorts from the tree in the normal manner. But hanging there and looking at the bushes down below, he thought the thing to do was to cut his shorts off and fall to the ground. The soft bushes would cushion the impact of his fall.
This he did and when he cut the last bit of fabric from himself, he suddenly plummeted to earth.
As he did so he also lost his grip of the knife.
The "soft" bushes that Young had cleverly spotted from fifteen foot up in the air hanging from the branch were actually holly bushes and landing in them caused a massive number of cuts, and jags.
All that would have been bad enough for a mere mortal but Young wasn’t done yet.
He also had the misfortune of landing squarely on a holly bush branch; effectively impaling himself.
Then the knife, which he had accidentally released fifteen foot above where he landed, now joined him stabbing him in his left thigh.
Apparently, he was in a lot of pain.
Enter his friend Robert to the rescue.
Robert Uhlenake had apparently observed the last bit of this fiasco and, despite his inebriated state, had the awareness to realized that his fiend Young was in trouble.
Then he also did that thing that stupid drunk people should never do.
He hit upon the idea too, this time of lowering a rope to his friend and pulling him up and over the fence.
The problem with this plan was that Uhlenake was outweighed by his friend by a good 100 lbs. But undaunted by this he was still determined on a rescue bid and figured he could use their truck to pull his friend Young back up.
Unfortunately, because of his state, Uhlenake put the truck in reverse, rather than drive, broke through the fence, landed on Young (killing him), and subsequently died of internal injuries himself.
The two were found dead at the Gorge Amphitheater after the show. Uhlenake was in the pickup that was on top of Young at the bottom of a 20 ft drop. Young was found with severe lacerations, numerous fractures, contusions, and a branch in his anal cavity. He also had been stabbed and his pants were in a tree above him, some 15 ft off the ground.
For a while it was a mystery but the story as outlined above was eventually pieced together.
The final words on the story should perhaps go to Commissioner Appleton who summed it all up saying,
"So that's how a dead 255 lb man with no pants on, with a truck on top of him and a stick up his ass came to be".
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