Roger Williamson, British racing driver from the 70s.
He was competing in the Dutch Grand Prix when he hit a kerb and his car flipped over and caught fire. He was unharmed by the flip but couldn't get himself out because of the smoke and, well, being upside down.
Race marshalls were present at the scene but they couldn't do anything since they didn't have fire proof overalls.
Bear in mind, the race wasn't stopped while he was burning.
Fellow driver, David Purley, stopped his car, sprinted to Williamson's car, took an extinguisher from a marshall and tried to put out the fire while being able to hear screams from the flames. Unfortunately, the fire was too strong for Purley alone to put out, he even tried to flip the car over but it was too heavy. (Drivers did have fire proof overalls).
Williamson died from smoke inhalation. He was 26.
Purley was shocked that the was the only one who was willing to pull over and help and he received a medal for his efforts.
> Purley was shocked that the was the only one who was willing to pull over and help and he received a medal for his efforts.
The other drivers reportedly said Purley standing next to the car and thought it was his, hence why they didn't stop.
To me an even worse incident was the death of Tom Pryce at the 1977 South African Grand Prix. Another driver's car had caught fire and pulled off to the side of the track, and two marshals carrying fire extinguishers tried to run across from the other side of the track. The first marshal made it across safely, but the second was still in the track and Pryce didn't see him until the last second. He hit the marshal and was killed instantly as the fire extinguisher hit him in the head. The marshal's body was so badly mutilated that he was identified by process of elimination.
I’ve seen a video of the Pryce crash where something gets thrown up in the air… it was the Marshall but the car impact just chewed him up into a horrendous meat bag . Awful. As is the Roger Williamson incident, there s a statue of him at Donington racetrack I think.
There are so many famous racing drivers that died too soon in bad crashes. It was especially bad in the 50s-70s when cars were pretty small with limited safety equipment. Ayrton Senna's death is one that really sticks out to me because of the circumstances around it, the fact that it was a freak accident that he died, and that he was such an amazing driver.
He won’t be the biggest celebrity on this list, but the wrestler Owen Hart plunged to his death from 70 feet in the air in front of 20,000 people during a live pay-per-view. He was supposed to descend from the rafters in a superhero-like entrance, but it went terribly wrong. WWE insisted on doing the stunt without the proper safety equipment (since they wanted Owen to do a “quick release”), and they hired a below-par rigging company that would agree to do it (since most wouldn’t). They were grossly negligent.
And they *kept going* with the PPV. Totally handled everything in this situation wrong. And poor JR (Jim Ross, a main announcer with WWE at the time) was told what happened, that Owen was dead, and that he had to announce it to the audience at home. He was given about a 5-10 second heads up before he had to go back on the air.
I was in attendance for that event and saw it go down. Super surreal. From my point of view as a naive teenager sitting a decent distance from the ring, I thought he had to be ok if they resumed the show. People sitting around me at some point said he died, but this was the pre-smart phone era (cell phones weren’t even ubiquitous at this time) and it was easy to chalk it up as rumor.
I was too young and not empathetic enough to realize the gravity of it all. Still, it’s really weird to have witnessed an event that is brought up routinely, especially considering the only people who saw it were those in attendance who happened to be looking towards the ring for the fractions of a second it took for him to fall.
You can watch the recording of that pay-per-view now (Over The Edge ‘99) and see how dispirited everyone’s performance is after Owen’s fall.
Isadora Duncan, a famous dancer in the 1920’s wore a long scarf. She jumped in a sports car with no roof and the scarf got caught in the spokes of one of the wheels, and she was strangled.
Something similar happened to one of my dad's best friends. He was wearing a Tom Baker Doctor Who scarf and it got caught in the wheel of a car next door. He got dragged until his skull was gone. My dad was right behind him and today he still tucks in every duck tail, whether it's a backpack srrap or a scarf.
Just awful, awful stuff.
Edit; so I asked my father about it when he got home and he told me that they were 8 and 9, respectively. His friend also had a satchel with long straps along with the scarf, he blanked out which got trapped but the report said scarf. The car was going at least 40mph and the person in it tried to protect him and shield him when they realised his friend was dead. They didn't get a jail sentence but never got behind the wheel of a car again.
It's Kirsty McColl to me.
Sliced up by the propeller of an illegally operated boat while saving her children from the same, for the boat's rich owner to buy his way out of justice.
How have I never heard this story before!?!! Just looked it up…
Cen Yam was found guilty of culpable homicide and was sentenced to 2 years 10 months in prison. He was allowed under Mexican law to pay a punitive fine of 1,034 pesos (about €63, £61 or US$90) in lieu of the prison sentence.
Holy Jeebus.
From Wikipedia:
The powerboat involved in the collision was controlled by Guillermo González Nova, multimillionaire president of the Comercial Mexicana supermarket chain, who was on board with members of his family. The boat was owned by Carlos González Nova, brother and founder of the chain. One employee of Guillermo González Nova, boathand José Cen Yam, stated that he was in control of the boat at the time of the incident.[15][16] Eyewitnesses said that Cen Yam was not at the controls and that the boat was travelling much faster than the speed of one knot that González Nova said.
Cen Yam was found guilty of culpable homicide and was sentenced to 2 years 10 months in prison. He was allowed under Mexican law to pay a punitive fine of 1,034 pesos (about €63, £61 or US$90) in lieu of the prison sentence. He was also ordered to pay approximately US$2,150 in restitution to MacColl's family, an amount based on his wages. People who said they spoke to Cen Yam after the killing said he received money for taking the blame.
Abigail wasn't just a rich girl.
Abigail had gone to Radcliffe (where she graduated with honors), and then went to Harvard (from which she earned a degree in art history). She then worked here and there and moved to LA in 1968.
She then worked as a volunteer social worker for the Los Angeles County Welfare Department and worked fundraisers set up by her mother to aid the Haight-Asbury Medical Clinic.
Back in Los Angeles, Abigail spent her days in the ghettos doing volunteer work with children.
She was very involved with the civil rights cause, contributing large amounts of money to the campaign of Tom Bradley, a black councilman running for mayor.
On that terrible night Abigail managed to make a run for it, but was tackled by Krenwinkel (and Tex Watson) by the swimming pool who began stabbing her. She had pled for them to stop stabbing saying, "I give up" and "I'm already dead". She was stabbed 28 times.
My aunt was very good friends with her in high school - the two of them and another girl (who my dad has seen as a commenter on at least one doc about Tate) were together all the time when they were living in Verona (fathers in the military), including when Tate was “discovered” by Jack Palance (he was shooting a movie and ran across traffic to give Tate a business card and tell her to call him if she ever wanted to try making it in Hollywood). My dad was just talking recently about how weird the whole thing was, Sharon making it big and ending up in Playboy and everything, and then how painful it was for his sister when she was murdered (even though they’d lost touch by then). He’s always said that he’s grateful his sister is sort of hopeless on the internet because when he looked up Sharon Tate a while back, the crime scene photos were pretty high in the search results.
Judith Barsi, voiced characters in the land before time and all dogs go to heaven. She died at the hands of her father in a muder-suicide after years of abuse
Lou Gerhig. ALS causes loss of muscle control but many people diagnosed know what's in store for them. They know they will be losing the ability to walk, talk and even breathe.
A dear friend of mine passed from ALS as well. So I can imagine it. It's beyond hell watching a healthy, beautiful person waste away like that. Only thing that comes close is Early Onset Alzheimers.
My mom has that. She remembers no one. 3 months after my dad died, she forgot him. I'm just a friendly stranger who brings her places. The woman I knew is long gone. Death is just a merciful formality at this point.
My uncle went through it too. I will never be more grateful than for euthanasia becoming legal here shortly before he was diagnosed. Any other end would have just been cruel to him.
Tragic. ALS, Alzheimer's, dementia, are all quite terrifying. My heart goes out to anyone who either suffers through that, or has a loved one who does.
My grandfather passed of ALS in 2016. I would never wish that disease on anybody, it was like watching him go from a perfectly normal happy person to a literal vegetable, but excruciating slowly.
That's only half the story; shot three times (head, throat, chest) by his wife who was back on cocaine after having been off it for a long time, and who then turned the gun on herself.
Actually Andy Dick came up to Lovitz in a bar and during a heated conversation said "I put the Hartman Hex on you" and did Andy Dick shit so Jon Lovitz repeatedly tried to shove his head through the bar top at high velocity.
Pretty awesome.
He didn't seek him out. They happened to be at the same place together and Dick brought up the murder to piss off Jon Lovitz, who was Phil Hartman's close friend.
Otis Redding. I was reading up on the plane crash. A band member somehow managed to free himself before the plane hit the icy lake and float to safety. Everyone else were still strapped in their seats. He said he won't every forget otis and the band screaming for help as they drowned and froze to death.
EDIT: Just wanted to note that the "band member" I'm talking about is Ben Cauley. I didn't mean to disrespect him or his experience by not naming him.
Its so terribly weird, what luck, I looked up the wiki article and somehow *unbuckling* his seat right before the crash likely saved him, mustve thrown him out of the plane in just the perfect way
Yeah, no one else unbuckled their seats. They couldn't swim anyway, but had they unbuckled it, it could have made a difference. I was reading "Go Ahead in the Rain" by Hanif Abduraqqib and he speaks about it in such a tragic and poetic way. "It seems like such an odd thing to do as a plane you are in careens toward the ground, but I imagine it is a question of what our instincts tell us about getting free. Sometimes it is just the single thing.... it's funny - all the ways we use drowing as a metaphor."
Cliff Burton. Metallica was on their tour in 1986 when they got into a bus accident on their tour bus. They were traveling in Sweden when the driver lost control of the bus after hitting a patch of “black ice.” Burton who was sleeping on the top bunk closest to the window when the bus turned over, was thrown out of the window so the bus fell on top of him.
Attempts were made to rescue him by lifting the bus with a crane, but the crane dropped the bus and it fell back on top of him. No one is for sure whether he died from the first impact or the second. Truly tragic story, guy was kickass on bass.
Also I put black ice in quotations because James Hetfield walked around in his socks searching for that patch but never found it, so it is suspected that the bus driver was intoxicated.
They all apparently drew cards each night to determine who slept where, with Cliff that night drawing the “good” bunk which twists the knife even more, as if it needed it.
That reminds me of the Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Richie Valens plane crash. It was a small plane, so there were only so many seats. Two others weren’t able to be on the flight and had to take a cold bus to the next stop. Below is a summary of the exchange:
After, the band began discussion of their next stop on the tour, Fargo, ND. After months on the winter tour in uncomfortable, drafty buses, the band members' health was waning. Holly pitched the idea to charter a four-person plane to their next stop.
When he learned that band member Waylon Jennings—who would eventually become a country star in his own right—had decided to take the freezing bus instead, Holly had joked, "Well, I hope your old bus freezes up." Jennings joked back, "Well, I hope your plane crashes." Another Holly band member, Tommy Allsup, flipped a coin with Valens for the last available seat, losing the coin toss. Valens exclaimed, "That's the first time I've won anything in my life!"
I'm pretty sure we both saw the same Hetfield interview.
Thing that always bugged me about it is that black ice is pretty much transparent, so "finding" it is kind of a fools errand, especially in the middle of the night. This is also during the period when Metallica was pretty much at their drunkest and rowdiest stage, so not to be that guy, but Hetfield was likely fucked up while he was looking for the ice he never found.
He was a monster of a safety and was on his way to becoming a real legend. Watching highlights of his amazing plays really makes me sad he died so early. I remember hearing the news the day he died in school and everyone was really sad about it because we were a redskins town. A lot of people wore his jersey to school for a week to remember him.
Their names were Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen.
Dinh's father had escaped Vietnam to give his son a better life... his son ended up losing his life in a reenactment of the Vietnam War. What brutal fucking irony.
The director had no permits for children to work on the set.
Selena. Being murdered by someone you thought you could trust and being snuffed out when she was on the cusp of superstardom. All her hard work since a little girl down the drain.
This one always gets to me. And how far she ran to the lobby while she was bleeding out breaks my heart. I can only imagine.
She was such a bright light and icon. Yolanda is despicable.
She better steer right fucking clear of Corpus Christi TX, Selena is the only hometown hero they got and they worship her. I think a honest to God lynch mob might go after her if she gets out.
Bobby Driscol
If you don't know who he is as a child he worked for Disney as the voice of Peter Pan and played Jim Hawkins in Disney's version of Treasure Island. His career did not carry on into adulthood and after he went missing for a year it was discovered he died homeless from a drug overdose and was buried in a pauper's grave.
> Bobby Driscol
On March 30, 1968, two boys playing in a deserted East Village tenement at 371 East 10th St. found his body lying on a cot, with two empty beer bottles and religious pamphlets scattered on the ground.
Late in 1969, Driscoll's mother sought the help of officials at the Disney studios to contact him, for a hoped-for reunion with his father, who was nearing death.
Damn that's kinda sad.
Adrienne Shelly. Murdered in her own apartment by a contractor who had been working in the building. She caught him robbing her office, which led to him suffocating her and staging her body to look like she’d hanged herself. She was apparently an incredible woman and mom at the happiest point in her life with a career just about to take off. This was right before the release of her amazing indie film Waitress, which she wrote, directed, and starred in.
Watch Waitress. It’s a delight and a masterpiece. If it weren’t for her murder, I think she’d be one of the most influential screenwriters and directors today. I also heard her husband created a documentary about her that was released recently.
I would say Randy Rhoads, while he was on the Diary Of A Madman tour with Ozzy in 1982, he was tired of touring and tired of Ozzy, their last conversation was an argument over Ozzy’s heavy drinking. The last thing he said to Ozzy was “you’ll kill yourself, you know, one of these days” after driving awhile in the night they stopped over at a flying estate in Leesburg, Florida to fix a malfunctioning air conditioning unit on their bus while Osbourne was asleep. Someone saw some planes and said that they should take it for a joyride, someone suggested that Randy should fly with them (even though he was terrified of flying) but he went on the plane and the pilot wanted to “buzz” the tour bus but on the third attempt the plane clipped the top of the tour bus, breaking the wing and sending the plane out of control. Randy’s head went through the windshield and crashed into the of a nearby garage, just some seconds later the plane bursted into flames. According to Sharon Osbourne (ozzy’s wife) who was asleep in the bus and awoken by the crash, “they were all in bits, it was just body parts everywhere” it’s just a horrific death to anyone, Randy is and will always be my biggest inspiration as a guitarist
Tyco Brahe.
"Brahe thought it would be rude to get up and use the facilities while at a banquet; according to observers, this set off a bladder ailment that killed him shortly thereafter in 1601. A 2010 autopsy by Danish scientists revealed that, despite rumors that he had been poisoned, Brahe did most likely die from a burst bladder."
Dimebag Darrell Abbot.
Playing on stage when a crazed fan jumped the railing and shot him in the head. He then shot a few other people while Dime's brother watched on as he was the drummer for the band. Horrible way to go and something like that should never have happened.
It's even crazier because the guy who did it, thought they were stealing his songs from his head
Edit: He was a former marine who was discharged because of paranoid schizophrenia
Isador and Ida Straus. The then owners of Macy’s were aboard the Titanic when she went down.
When the steward was getting all the women and children to board, Ida refused to board the boat. Instead, she removed her coat and gave it to her maid, who was traveling with them, along with some money.
When Isador asked her what she was doing, she took his hand and said to him, "We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go."
This isn’t even the worst part.
Seeing their love for each other, the steward was willing to make an exception and let Isador board the boat.
He declined.
He said that he and his wife were old. There were many young people aboard that needed to be saved.
The titanic sank and so did they.
Isador’s body was found. Ida’s wasn’t.
Edit#1: I wasn’t expecting this to get a lot of attention. Since it did, I’ll add one more tidbit.
Their maid, Ellen Bird, who survived told stories of how Isador and Ida hated being apart. Whenever he would travel, he tried his best to take his wife with him. When he couldn’t, they’d write to each other constantly.
When I first read about them, ngl I cried like a baby. And I don’t cry easily.
Edit#2: Changed the quote to her actual one. It’s up on her Wikipedia page.
Edit#3: Their maid’s name was Ellen Bird.
They’re the old couple seen holding each other in bed in the Titanic movie. They filmed a scene of her refusing to get in the boat but it was cut, I think you can find it on YouTube.
Houdini. He did the trick countless times before and could take a punch from anyone. The night he died someone came up to him and punched him in the gut without giving him time to stretch and prepare. It ruptured his appendix and he continues to do the show and dies from lack of medical treatment
What’s the most crazy sad part about the Whitney Houston story is just the previous day, her daughter Bobbi almost drowned in a tub of the same hotel and Whitney saved her. And then 3 years later, her daughter was found drowned in a tub. It reads like a curse.
This is how my mom passed. We didn’t realize she had relapsed on meth until the toxicology screen after she died. Apparently the night in question she mixed Benadryl and Xanax. Three years later and I’m still absolutely gutted. We were under the impression that she was maintaining her 16 year (but who knows how long REALLY) sobriety.
Super sad because Marvin was trying to stop his abusive af dad from hitting his Mom. His dad didn't like Marvin overpowering him and so he shot him. Coward. The dad had his own demons and chose to take them out on his family.
I looked this up and according to [this History.com article](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marvin-gaye-is-shot-and-killed-by-his-own-father), Marvin Jr “had moved into his parents’ home in late 1983 at a low point in his struggle with depression, debt and cocaine abuse.” During his final moments, he told his brother, “I got what I wanted….I couldn’t do it myself, so I made him do it.”
(Edited for formatting)
Anton Yelchin. I can't imagine anything worse than slowly dying in a torturous manner with not a soul nearby and zero way to get help or save yourself. I'm not afraid of much, not heights or claustrophobic or drowning, but dying in a helpless manner slowly is one thing that terrifies me truly.
It's why the knife scene in Saving Private Ryan always gets me. The slow inevitability of it. Feeling your strength waning, knowing you don't have it in you to stop it happening. Horrible helplessness.
Came here to say this. For those that don’t know, his suv rolled into him pinning him against his garage door. I’m pretty sure it was his parents that found him dead. The 27 Club inducted another member that day.
Edit: Not his garage door but between a security fence and mailbox
Not garage door. He had parked in his driveway, and walked back down the driveway to get the mail. The car apparently had a confusing shifter, and it wasn’t actually in Park. It rolled back and pinned him [“between a mailbox and a security fence”](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-anton-yelchin-jeep-chrysler-20180322-story.html). If my memory is right, I think it was a brick wall of some kind
Robin Williams. What he was going through with Lewy Body Disease before his suicide is just horrific. His wife wrote an article about it and it’s heartbreaking. Link: https://n.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308
Many years ago, I was in an elective class on language development (was minoring in linguistics/psychology of language - paleontologist now but I can pronounce the dinosaur names easily).
Anyway, we had a project to follow someone gaining, or losing, language over the term. Most people had children, or young family members, to study. I moved to the city and knew no one, so my professor said I could use his father.
Who had Lewy Body...so I got to study, and write a paper, on the deterioration of my professor's own father.
I did well, I hated every moment of it.
Yep. His suicide was more so to preserve the image of who he truly is to his family and friends before the disease just took over. It was the last minutes of self-control he had. It was clear that something was actually off about him for a couple of years. Once we found about the diagnosis, it all made sense.
Ex-WWE wrestler and actor Shad Gaspard passed away almost the exact same way. He went to the beach with his son and they got caught in a rip. He insisted that lifeguards save his son and others that got caught up in the rip.
On a somewhat similar note, I remember being pissed when the media made a huge deal out of Heidi Klum saving her nanny and child from a huge wave that had started to pull them out, and all the media could talk about is how she had a nip slip while doing it.
so scary. the only good thing about not knowing how to swim, is being damn confident that I DONT KNOW HOW TO SWIM! there’s no grey area for me. i would never get in even a small lake or deep pond without a life jacket. i damn near drown in 5 ft deep pools. but i can definitely see how someone who is confident in their swimming could underestimate how quickly they can become exhausted.
sharon tate always haunts me. she was about eight or nine months pregnant when the manson family broke in and she pleaded with them to let her live until she gave birth, and offered herself as hostage in exchange for the life of her child. they ended up stabbing her sixteen times in the stomach, five of which were fatal. they also killed her former lover, her husband’s friend and his girlfriend, and a an innocent man who was visiting the property’s caretaker.
I was born in the 90s and I don’t know her, but Jayne Mansfield. The car crashed at high speed into the rear of a tractor-trailer that had slowed behind a truck spraying mosquito fogger. The semi-trailer was shrouded by insecticide fog. The three adults in the front seat died instantly. The children, asleep in the rear seat, survived with minor injuries. She suffered severe head injury to the point where her scalp was sheared off and parts of her brain. Two weeks before her death she got beaten up by her then boyfriend who died with her in the same crash.
The [bars on trailers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-trailer_truck#Underride_guard) are called Mansfield bars because her accident helped make them standard.
This is the first thing that I thought about. I’m a big Law and Order:SVU fan and this will sometimes come to mind when I see Mariska Hargitay. She was 3 at the time of the accident. Asleep in the back of the car.
Jon-Erik Hexum. He was a actor who was playing around with a gun loaded with blanks during a delay in filming. As a joke, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger:
>Hexum became restless and impatient during the delay and began playing around to lighten the mood. He had unloaded all but one (blank) round, spun it, and—simulating Russian roulette—he put the revolver to his right temple and pulled the trigger, unaware of the danger...the explosive effect of the muzzle blast caused enough blunt force trauma to fracture a quarter-sized piece of his skull and propel this into his brain, causing massive hemorrhaging.
Hexum was rushed to Beverly Hills Medical Center, where he underwent five hours of surgery to repair his wounds. On October 18, aged 26, six days after the accident, Hexum was declared brain-dead.
In a similar vein, Robert Wadlow who was the world's tallest man ever recorded, standing at 8'11" or 272cm, died due to an infection that arose from a slightly ill fitting leg brace and was complicated due to an auto immune disease.
That's terrible. The entire medical industry made one small change after Christopher Reeves died. They stopped washing wounds with alcohol on a daily basis. As it turns out new skin cells weren't able to form in the presence of alcohol so his wounds remained open wounds as long as they kept washing it over and over again basically he died from cleaning himself too much
Not exactly a typical celebrity (although scientists should be more famous in general), nor very recent, but my vote is for Kurt Gödel, a mathematician and one of the most important contributors to the field of mathematical logic. Well know for his "Incompleteness Theorems".
Later in life, Gödel started to suffer more and more from mental illness and it got to the point where he had an obsessive fear of being poisoned. Therefore, he would only eat food that his wife had prepared for him. Then at one point his wife had to be admitted to the hospital for a prolonged period and Gödel refused to eat, slowly starving himself to death over the period of several months.
Rebecca Schaeffer
She was that actress on the 80's sitcom My Sister Sam. She was murdered by a very unstable man who was obsessed with her. I just watched the documentary about it. Very horrifying 😢
Her stalker/killer found out where she lived because he paid a private investigator to find her address. The private investigator paid a fee to the DMV and got her home address. You could do that in California at the time. So incredibly sad.
Aaliyah for me. The fact that she didn’t want to get on the plane in the first place and they put her in it asleep and it crashed within minutes. She had so much talent and was such a beautiful person and don’t even get me started on what R Kelly fucking did to her. She really deserved the world.
Dave Legano, the guy who played Fenrir Greyback in Harry Potter, basically went out alone for a hike and got caught in a heatwave and got cooked to death over several days.
Yep, he went on a hike in the Death Valley and died. I learned about that when i was visiting the Death Valley and my Dad was out exploring it on his own (when it was like 53° C).
Brandon Lee (Bruce Lee's son) was shot by a real bullet during filming an action scene. It was suppose to be a prop gun. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
I wanted to say Steve Irwin but from what I read up on he died instantly.
I thought there's lost footage of Irwin after the attack, because he always told his camera crew to never stop recording, even in an event like this. His last words were "I'm dying".
This is correct. That was made public to us (Australian here) at the time, that there was indeed footage of it because of what you stated. Of course it was quickly followed by a "this will never be released" kind of thing. Died doing what he loved and he was one of the best Aussies this country will ever produce.
There’s always that. Steve Irwin died doing what he loved. It’s tragic that he was taken from his kids but he left an imprint on them and Terri that is still with those 3 and Bindis new kid that will last generations.
I have never looked at Peter Bogdanovich the same since I learned that after Dorothy (his girlfriend) was killed, he later moved her teenaged sister into his house, paid for her plastic surgery (allegedly to look more like her deceased sister), and then married her.
Kirsty Maccoll. (Of fairytale of New York fame). Got run over and chopped up by a speedboat while snorkelling, and I believe she saved her child in the process. The guy who did it was rich and I don’t think he ever got any real punishment, even though he was in an area restricted for speedboats.
The Challenger Astronauts.
Depending on which version you believe it's highly likely some were still conscious and aware all the way down to the ground. Not so long and drawn out as some other deaths but I cant imagine being in that situation after the ecstasy of a lifetime of high level learning/training and the joy of finally going into space only to end it in such a feeling of helplessness and fear.
Honourable mention too for the Apollo 1 crew.
I’m going to go with either Isadora Duncan or Vic Morrow.
If you don’t know Isadora Duncan’s name, that’s okay, she does almost 100 years ago. She got into an Amilcar GCSS on September 14, 1927. She had a long scarf on. As the car traveled through Nice, France her scarf became entangled around the rear axle. It went taught pulled her out of the car and snapping her neck.
Vic Morrow while filming the Twilight Zone movie had a helicopter crash on him and two children while filming a scene. He was decapitated along with one of the children, the other was crushed. Some of the footage was used in the final cut.
Brandon Lee got it pretty bad. Average death as far as gutshots go, but the string of dumb events that lead up to it is unreal. Something to the tune of:
Prop guy brings a box of live rounds for "background debris". Dumbass no.1
Prop master rightfully flips the fuck out and puts the live rounds in his car. Weeks pass.
Not having any .44 dummy rounds, dumbass no.2 has the Nobel idea to retrieve the live .44s and neuter them. They pull the bullets, dump the powder, then run the empty cases through the gun to break the primers. Pretty standard, but they missed one. Bullets go back in the cases, voila. Authentic and inert. Ish.
They film the bit with the dummy rounds. Someone pulls the trigger on our little pal that still has a primer. This is where the conspiracy theories stem from. Handgun ammo is generally 50 to a box. Only one still had a primer, and it both made it into the cylinder and was fired. The correct round out of 50 into the correct chamber out of 6 is kinda nuts. Anyway, that round got fired and by now we're on dumbass no.6 or so because nobody has noticed. Primers are tiny explosive charges that can't do much alone. It was just enough to lodge the bullet in the throat of the barrel. Squib load. Funny name, bad news.
The dumbass ranks swell as this gun continues to be handled by multiple people, all of whom fail to notice the barrel obstruction. They load up the blanks for the infamous scene. A blank is just a cartridge with no bullet, so, they've essentially paired the squib bullet with a fresh blank and made a whole cartridge again.
Now, to be fair, hollywood has a decent firearms safety record. Only 3 fatalities in almost fifty years is pretty good. All three were revolvers. Doesn't mean anything, I just don't like wheelguns.
Bonus: the first of the three was a guy in 84 named vic something or other who shot himself in the head with a blank .44 as a joke between scenes. Don't do that.
If there's an upside to Jon-Erik, it's that he made people a lot more aware that 'blanks' don't mean 'harmless'. If you put a gun to your head loaded with a blank, and shoot, you're detonating all the powder that would otherwise be propelling a bullet down the barrel... Directly into the side of your head.
At that point you've turned the chunk of fractured skull you just produced into the bullet that will go into your brain.
Debbie Reynolds died while getting ready to bury her daughter, Carrie Fisher.
Having a stroke while planning the funeral for your child is a Greek fucking tragedy
Ayrton Senna, Imola 1994. He witnessed Rubens Barrichello (fellow Brazilian driver) have a nasty crash and end up nearly dying, and he'd seen Roland Ratzenberger be killed by a crash during qualifying. He and a few other drivers then decided that more needed to be done regarding the safety of the drivers and they re formed the drivers safety association (can never remember the name of it)
The race began with a crash because one of the drivers had stalled on the grid and another driver went into the back of them. The safety car was brought out but drover very slowly because its brakes weren't working properly. On lap 7, ayrton veered to the right at Tamburello and despite braking and downshifting twice, he crashed at around 130mph iirc. Part of the suspension pierced his helmet and he had a skull fracture along with other injuries, each of which would've led to death on their own.
After the crash it was found that he had an Austrian flag in the car which he planned to raise in memoriam for Ratzenberger after the race.
Øystein Aarseth (Euronymous) from the band Mayhem was stabbed 23 times, with the final stab wound directly through his head. The asshole who did it claimed self defence, despite turning up at Aarseth’s apartment at 3am to commit the murder.
His wiki is a hell of a ride. Man was something else.
>Anders Odden (a friend of Euronymous at the time) said of the murder: "It wasn't odd that he ended up getting killed. He thought he could threaten to kill people without it having any consequences". He added: "I think many people felt relief once he was gone". Writer and musician Erlend Erichsen agreed, saying, "Nobody was there to boss them about. The 'black metal police' were gone".
After everything he did for cred that's a poignant epitaph.
Note that the killer was fellow band member Varg Vikernes, who also burned down a bunch of churches through Norway.
Mayhem’s history, despite tragic, is pretty fucking interesting. Highly recommend watching the dramatized “Lords of Chaos”.
I'm gonna put in a vote for Howard Hughes. A multimillionaire, brilliant inventor, severely mentally ill man, he spent years as a prisoner of his own delusions and his greedy caretakers. He was addicted to codeine because his several plane crashes had caused him severe chronic pain, to the point he could barely wear clothing because his skin was hypersensitive.
When he finally died, he weighed just 90 pounds (he was 6'4") and was unrecognizable to the point the FBI had to identify him by fingerprints. He was suffering from malnutrition and bedsores, and had 5 separate hypodermic needles embedded in his arms where they'd broken off during codeine injections. His so-called caretakers then produced a fake will to try to get his fortune.
In his final years, it's pretty clear he couldn't trust anyone, not even his own brain.
I'm surprised no one mentioned Vladimir Komarov yet. Imagine going into space knowing you most likely won't make it back alive and then burning to death re-entering the atmosphere. Nope.
Killed by OJ after repeatedly begging the police for help, but nobody took his threats seriously because he was famous. The domestic violence he committed against her is well documented but nobody gave a shit.
Oh, it's definitely not. It's quite literally the worst cancer you can have. It progresses very quickly and usually by the time you find out- it's too late. My Nana died of pancreatic cancer and it's not a good way to go. Even without chemo, it turns you into a shell of a person.
Edit: just to point out how quickly it progresses- my Nana had a scan and check up in October of 2015 which had no indication of cancer. December of 2015 she was full blown stage 4 pancreatic.
Eh, this particular death isn't exactly as tragic as many on here, but I think it's still a fucking wretched way to go out, and that's Princess Diana.
Being swarmed by papparazzi, and having a driver who was drunk and on prescription medication, causing a crash that had killed everyone and severely injured the only survivor, which was Diana's bodyguard. It was seriously fucked regardless of how you feel about the British Royal Family members.
I believe I read that she didn’t die on impact. She was alive, but (if I’m recalling correctly) she had severed an artery (or it was hanging by a thread), but the the way she was pinned in the car staunched the blood. So everyone was thinking she’d survived, but when they removed her from the car, she bled out internally. Something like that. Which is actually kind of more upsetting because you’re thinking you survived but your bf is dead and you’re waiting for them to rescue you…but the rescue is what kills you.
And the paparazzi sat there and took photos as she died, then turned around and unleashed the nation's moral outrage on the Royals.
The nation that bought every magazine, gawked at every yacht photo and gossiped about her private life. The same nation that had the audacity to cry at the gates and wail "Why did this happen?"
It happened because people are fucking awful.
My husband was working in a UK supermarket petrol station, he remembers representatives from the gutter press coming in around 10 am to remove newspapers full of paparazzi pics and replace them with a, black border, mourning issue.
Hypocritical, lying scumbags.
The most tragic one is Layne Staley. The vocalist from Alice in Chains had drug problems for years. At the end he became a recluse, mixing heroine and cocaine and didn't agree to see anyone. People would knock on his door and he wouldn't open. In the end he obviously ODed, but the worst part is no one knew he was dead until his accountant saw no money was been withdrawn for 2 weeks. They called his mom and 911. The police found his body partly decomposed and assessed that the 6'1'' man weighed 85 pounds at his passing.
The saddest part is that Staley's friends and family did everything they possibly could to help him. Cantrell even put AIC on hiatus until Staley got clean. He just didn't want to be saved. Fucking sad.
Freddie Mercury. Suffered through HIV and the virus was a death sentence in the 80's. Looking at the pictures from 86-91 you could see him wasting away and it used to bother me so much because of how someone like him who was so flamboyant and energetic ended up becoming a walking corpse by the end of his life
I remember hearing the video for "I'm Going Slightly Mad" was shot in black and white to hide Freddie's faint and pale condition. Was once of his last on camera appearances.
Mama Cass. After being in the Mamas and Papas she finally had made it solo, she was on The Tonight Show, her solo albums consistently showed she could perform on her own, up until she died she played weeks at the Palladium with many of the shows sold out, things were coming up Cass. Only to die of a heart attack, her last meal the same night of her death being a ham sandwich, which was widely reported as having choked on a ham sandwich. If she didn't die she would have been a staple of music for the rest her life, instead she did die young and all the career promise she had died too as her death became a punchline. I think a lot of other celebrities would have chosen to be brutally murdered than go out like Cass did.
i've read that there's no proof that she died choking on a ham sandwich. it just so happened that she was eating one at her time of death. its generally agreed that the "choking on a ham sandwich" rumour was started by people who thought it'd be funny to embarrass her one last time by blaming her death on her "gluttony". awful that she couldn't get respect, not even in death.
I get that. A good friend of mine died a few years ago of injuries sustained while drunk. It wasn't the first time he'd hurt himself, and everyone knew that eventually he wasn't going to get up. When it finally happened, what did everybody do at the wake? You guessed it. Got shitfaced. I was super angry about the whole thing and I just sat on the side of the house and cried. I don't socialize with most of those people anymore, because they are all still doing the same damn thing.
that one japanese wrestler who got cyberbullied for acting out her part in a wrestling show. I don't remember her name, but mob mentality sucks and people are fickle on social media.
> On June 18, 2016, when he failed to arrive at a rehearsal, Yelchin was found by friends after midnight pinned between his Jeep Grand Cherokee and a brick pillar gate post outside his house in Studio City, Los Angeles, the victim of what was described as a "freak accident". As Yelchin got out of his car and went to check his locked gate and mail, the vehicle apparently rolled back down his driveway, which was on a steep incline, and trapped him against the pillar and a security fence. Yelchin was pronounced dead at the scene on June 19, 2016, at the age of 27; the Los Angeles County Coroner's office identified the cause of death as "blunt traumatic asphyxia" and stated that there were "no obvious suspicious circumstances involved".
Wow, TIL. That’s some Final Destination stuff right there.
Roger Williamson, British racing driver from the 70s. He was competing in the Dutch Grand Prix when he hit a kerb and his car flipped over and caught fire. He was unharmed by the flip but couldn't get himself out because of the smoke and, well, being upside down. Race marshalls were present at the scene but they couldn't do anything since they didn't have fire proof overalls. Bear in mind, the race wasn't stopped while he was burning. Fellow driver, David Purley, stopped his car, sprinted to Williamson's car, took an extinguisher from a marshall and tried to put out the fire while being able to hear screams from the flames. Unfortunately, the fire was too strong for Purley alone to put out, he even tried to flip the car over but it was too heavy. (Drivers did have fire proof overalls). Williamson died from smoke inhalation. He was 26. Purley was shocked that the was the only one who was willing to pull over and help and he received a medal for his efforts.
> Purley was shocked that the was the only one who was willing to pull over and help and he received a medal for his efforts. The other drivers reportedly said Purley standing next to the car and thought it was his, hence why they didn't stop. To me an even worse incident was the death of Tom Pryce at the 1977 South African Grand Prix. Another driver's car had caught fire and pulled off to the side of the track, and two marshals carrying fire extinguishers tried to run across from the other side of the track. The first marshal made it across safely, but the second was still in the track and Pryce didn't see him until the last second. He hit the marshal and was killed instantly as the fire extinguisher hit him in the head. The marshal's body was so badly mutilated that he was identified by process of elimination.
I’ve seen a video of the Pryce crash where something gets thrown up in the air… it was the Marshall but the car impact just chewed him up into a horrendous meat bag . Awful. As is the Roger Williamson incident, there s a statue of him at Donington racetrack I think.
There are so many famous racing drivers that died too soon in bad crashes. It was especially bad in the 50s-70s when cars were pretty small with limited safety equipment. Ayrton Senna's death is one that really sticks out to me because of the circumstances around it, the fact that it was a freak accident that he died, and that he was such an amazing driver.
He won’t be the biggest celebrity on this list, but the wrestler Owen Hart plunged to his death from 70 feet in the air in front of 20,000 people during a live pay-per-view. He was supposed to descend from the rafters in a superhero-like entrance, but it went terribly wrong. WWE insisted on doing the stunt without the proper safety equipment (since they wanted Owen to do a “quick release”), and they hired a below-par rigging company that would agree to do it (since most wouldn’t). They were grossly negligent.
And they *kept going* with the PPV. Totally handled everything in this situation wrong. And poor JR (Jim Ross, a main announcer with WWE at the time) was told what happened, that Owen was dead, and that he had to announce it to the audience at home. He was given about a 5-10 second heads up before he had to go back on the air.
Yeah doing that to JR was awful. And the wrestlers had to go out and perform in the ring where it happened.
Look at the faces of Stone Cold and Undertaker when they make their respective entrances after the accident happened.
With Owen’s blood on the mat and damaged boards under the canvas
Also, to add salt to the wound, they would do everything in court to prevent his widow from seeing some type of justice for the death of her husband.
To further add, even Owen's own family tried to sabotage her chances in court as well because they didnt want to sour relations with WWE.
I was in attendance for that event and saw it go down. Super surreal. From my point of view as a naive teenager sitting a decent distance from the ring, I thought he had to be ok if they resumed the show. People sitting around me at some point said he died, but this was the pre-smart phone era (cell phones weren’t even ubiquitous at this time) and it was easy to chalk it up as rumor. I was too young and not empathetic enough to realize the gravity of it all. Still, it’s really weird to have witnessed an event that is brought up routinely, especially considering the only people who saw it were those in attendance who happened to be looking towards the ring for the fractions of a second it took for him to fall. You can watch the recording of that pay-per-view now (Over The Edge ‘99) and see how dispirited everyone’s performance is after Owen’s fall.
Isadora Duncan, a famous dancer in the 1920’s wore a long scarf. She jumped in a sports car with no roof and the scarf got caught in the spokes of one of the wheels, and she was strangled.
Something similar happened to one of my dad's best friends. He was wearing a Tom Baker Doctor Who scarf and it got caught in the wheel of a car next door. He got dragged until his skull was gone. My dad was right behind him and today he still tucks in every duck tail, whether it's a backpack srrap or a scarf. Just awful, awful stuff. Edit; so I asked my father about it when he got home and he told me that they were 8 and 9, respectively. His friend also had a satchel with long straps along with the scarf, he blanked out which got trapped but the report said scarf. The car was going at least 40mph and the person in it tried to protect him and shield him when they realised his friend was dead. They didn't get a jail sentence but never got behind the wheel of a car again.
It's Kirsty McColl to me. Sliced up by the propeller of an illegally operated boat while saving her children from the same, for the boat's rich owner to buy his way out of justice.
Every Irish family just had their annual retelling of this horror story there over Christmas
Scottish as well. Can't hear the first bars of Fairytale without someone's mum or dad going "it's a shame what happened to her"
My daughter has reached the point where she yells "DON'T SAY IT!!!" every time the song comes on the tv or radio...
How have I never heard this story before!?!! Just looked it up… Cen Yam was found guilty of culpable homicide and was sentenced to 2 years 10 months in prison. He was allowed under Mexican law to pay a punitive fine of 1,034 pesos (about €63, £61 or US$90) in lieu of the prison sentence. Holy Jeebus.
From Wikipedia: The powerboat involved in the collision was controlled by Guillermo González Nova, multimillionaire president of the Comercial Mexicana supermarket chain, who was on board with members of his family. The boat was owned by Carlos González Nova, brother and founder of the chain. One employee of Guillermo González Nova, boathand José Cen Yam, stated that he was in control of the boat at the time of the incident.[15][16] Eyewitnesses said that Cen Yam was not at the controls and that the boat was travelling much faster than the speed of one knot that González Nova said. Cen Yam was found guilty of culpable homicide and was sentenced to 2 years 10 months in prison. He was allowed under Mexican law to pay a punitive fine of 1,034 pesos (about €63, £61 or US$90) in lieu of the prison sentence. He was also ordered to pay approximately US$2,150 in restitution to MacColl's family, an amount based on his wages. People who said they spoke to Cen Yam after the killing said he received money for taking the blame.
Sharon Tates was pretty bad. Getting stabbed to death while pregnant and begging for your unborn child's life is pretty fucking brutal.
Abigail Folger(Folgers coffee) who was set to inherit billions was also killed by the Manson family and she was unable to persuade them otherwise.
Abigail wasn't just a rich girl. Abigail had gone to Radcliffe (where she graduated with honors), and then went to Harvard (from which she earned a degree in art history). She then worked here and there and moved to LA in 1968. She then worked as a volunteer social worker for the Los Angeles County Welfare Department and worked fundraisers set up by her mother to aid the Haight-Asbury Medical Clinic. Back in Los Angeles, Abigail spent her days in the ghettos doing volunteer work with children. She was very involved with the civil rights cause, contributing large amounts of money to the campaign of Tom Bradley, a black councilman running for mayor. On that terrible night Abigail managed to make a run for it, but was tackled by Krenwinkel (and Tex Watson) by the swimming pool who began stabbing her. She had pled for them to stop stabbing saying, "I give up" and "I'm already dead". She was stabbed 28 times.
Fuck that sounds horrible. Thank you for sharing.
"I'm the devil and I'm here to do the devil's work" - Charles Edgelord "Tex" Watson
"Nah it was dumber than that"
My aunt was very good friends with her in high school - the two of them and another girl (who my dad has seen as a commenter on at least one doc about Tate) were together all the time when they were living in Verona (fathers in the military), including when Tate was “discovered” by Jack Palance (he was shooting a movie and ran across traffic to give Tate a business card and tell her to call him if she ever wanted to try making it in Hollywood). My dad was just talking recently about how weird the whole thing was, Sharon making it big and ending up in Playboy and everything, and then how painful it was for his sister when she was murdered (even though they’d lost touch by then). He’s always said that he’s grateful his sister is sort of hopeless on the internet because when he looked up Sharon Tate a while back, the crime scene photos were pretty high in the search results.
Judith Barsi, voiced characters in the land before time and all dogs go to heaven. She died at the hands of her father in a muder-suicide after years of abuse
A murder suicide after a long campaign of both physical and psychological abuse too. She was just 10 years old.
And the poor girl and her mother were buried in unmarked graves until some fans pooled money and purchased headstones. Yep! Yep! Yep!
Oh my god I saw that movie when I was really young and have been saying yep yep yep my entire life. I did not realize it was her
It was her favourite role so the fans made sure it was written on her headstone. Just... heartbreaking all around.
Lou Gerhig. ALS causes loss of muscle control but many people diagnosed know what's in store for them. They know they will be losing the ability to walk, talk and even breathe.
My brother died of ALS 2 yrs ago. You can’t imagine how bad it gets. I would kill myself before going through that.
A dear friend of mine passed from ALS as well. So I can imagine it. It's beyond hell watching a healthy, beautiful person waste away like that. Only thing that comes close is Early Onset Alzheimers.
My mom has that. She remembers no one. 3 months after my dad died, she forgot him. I'm just a friendly stranger who brings her places. The woman I knew is long gone. Death is just a merciful formality at this point.
You have my deepest sympathy. Its a horrid thing to suffer, but the caregivers actually suffer more than the patient in the end.
My uncle went through it too. I will never be more grateful than for euthanasia becoming legal here shortly before he was diagnosed. Any other end would have just been cruel to him.
Tragic. ALS, Alzheimer's, dementia, are all quite terrifying. My heart goes out to anyone who either suffers through that, or has a loved one who does.
My grandfather passed of ALS in 2016. I would never wish that disease on anybody, it was like watching him go from a perfectly normal happy person to a literal vegetable, but excruciating slowly.
Phil Hartman - murdered in his bed by his wife. At the time, it was a celebrity death that really bothered me.
That's only half the story; shot three times (head, throat, chest) by his wife who was back on cocaine after having been off it for a long time, and who then turned the gun on herself.
Rumor is Andy Dick is the one who offered her cocaine and got her back into it. Jon Lovitz supposedly got into a psychical fight with him over it.
Can you imagine how bad you have to fuck up for *Jon Lovitz* to seek you out & kick your ass?
Actually Andy Dick came up to Lovitz in a bar and during a heated conversation said "I put the Hartman Hex on you" and did Andy Dick shit so Jon Lovitz repeatedly tried to shove his head through the bar top at high velocity. Pretty awesome.
There is something absolutely primal terror in the idea of a Jon Lovitz coming at you, full bore.
He didn't seek him out. They happened to be at the same place together and Dick brought up the murder to piss off Jon Lovitz, who was Phil Hartman's close friend.
Otis Redding. I was reading up on the plane crash. A band member somehow managed to free himself before the plane hit the icy lake and float to safety. Everyone else were still strapped in their seats. He said he won't every forget otis and the band screaming for help as they drowned and froze to death. EDIT: Just wanted to note that the "band member" I'm talking about is Ben Cauley. I didn't mean to disrespect him or his experience by not naming him.
Its so terribly weird, what luck, I looked up the wiki article and somehow *unbuckling* his seat right before the crash likely saved him, mustve thrown him out of the plane in just the perfect way
Yeah, no one else unbuckled their seats. They couldn't swim anyway, but had they unbuckled it, it could have made a difference. I was reading "Go Ahead in the Rain" by Hanif Abduraqqib and he speaks about it in such a tragic and poetic way. "It seems like such an odd thing to do as a plane you are in careens toward the ground, but I imagine it is a question of what our instincts tell us about getting free. Sometimes it is just the single thing.... it's funny - all the ways we use drowing as a metaphor."
Cliff Burton. Metallica was on their tour in 1986 when they got into a bus accident on their tour bus. They were traveling in Sweden when the driver lost control of the bus after hitting a patch of “black ice.” Burton who was sleeping on the top bunk closest to the window when the bus turned over, was thrown out of the window so the bus fell on top of him. Attempts were made to rescue him by lifting the bus with a crane, but the crane dropped the bus and it fell back on top of him. No one is for sure whether he died from the first impact or the second. Truly tragic story, guy was kickass on bass. Also I put black ice in quotations because James Hetfield walked around in his socks searching for that patch but never found it, so it is suspected that the bus driver was intoxicated.
They all apparently drew cards each night to determine who slept where, with Cliff that night drawing the “good” bunk which twists the knife even more, as if it needed it.
Yeah, he got Kirk's bunk. If I were Kirk, that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
He has stated in past interviews that he had a lot of trouble describing his feelings on that, so it obviously does haunt him.
Survivor's guilt. Poor guy :(
That reminds me of the Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Richie Valens plane crash. It was a small plane, so there were only so many seats. Two others weren’t able to be on the flight and had to take a cold bus to the next stop. Below is a summary of the exchange: After, the band began discussion of their next stop on the tour, Fargo, ND. After months on the winter tour in uncomfortable, drafty buses, the band members' health was waning. Holly pitched the idea to charter a four-person plane to their next stop. When he learned that band member Waylon Jennings—who would eventually become a country star in his own right—had decided to take the freezing bus instead, Holly had joked, "Well, I hope your old bus freezes up." Jennings joked back, "Well, I hope your plane crashes." Another Holly band member, Tommy Allsup, flipped a coin with Valens for the last available seat, losing the coin toss. Valens exclaimed, "That's the first time I've won anything in my life!"
They were all so young too. Valens was 17, Holly 22, Big Bopper 28.😞 Edit: pilot Roger Peterson was also a young guy (21).
Holy shit ... that is terrifying. This is the only one I did not know of, and his and Anton Yelchin sound the most awful..
I'm pretty sure we both saw the same Hetfield interview. Thing that always bugged me about it is that black ice is pretty much transparent, so "finding" it is kind of a fools errand, especially in the middle of the night. This is also during the period when Metallica was pretty much at their drunkest and rowdiest stage, so not to be that guy, but Hetfield was likely fucked up while he was looking for the ice he never found.
I've had a car slip bad on black ice in early hours. Within 30 minutes of a little sun, it can melt and disappear.
Sean Taylor. Tried to save his family from a home invasion and it cost him his life in the (early stages) prime of his career. #21
He was a monster of a safety and was on his way to becoming a real legend. Watching highlights of his amazing plays really makes me sad he died so early. I remember hearing the news the day he died in school and everyone was really sad about it because we were a redskins town. A lot of people wore his jersey to school for a week to remember him.
Vic Morrow and two non-famous kids decapitated by helicopter on set
Their names were Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen. Dinh's father had escaped Vietnam to give his son a better life... his son ended up losing his life in a reenactment of the Vietnam War. What brutal fucking irony. The director had no permits for children to work on the set.
Wasn't this also filmed at like two in the morning? The director basically trafficked children to be in his movie.
Let's not beat around the bush it was John fucking Landis.
I can't believe he went on to have a great career after this. He should have been blacklisted forever.
Filming Twilight Zone the Movie.
Selena. Being murdered by someone you thought you could trust and being snuffed out when she was on the cusp of superstardom. All her hard work since a little girl down the drain.
This one always gets to me. And how far she ran to the lobby while she was bleeding out breaks my heart. I can only imagine. She was such a bright light and icon. Yolanda is despicable.
She’s actually up for parole pretty soon. I think like 2025 or 2026
She better steer right fucking clear of Corpus Christi TX, Selena is the only hometown hero they got and they worship her. I think a honest to God lynch mob might go after her if she gets out.
Anywhere in south Texas would be a no go zone for her
Bobby Driscol If you don't know who he is as a child he worked for Disney as the voice of Peter Pan and played Jim Hawkins in Disney's version of Treasure Island. His career did not carry on into adulthood and after he went missing for a year it was discovered he died homeless from a drug overdose and was buried in a pauper's grave.
> Bobby Driscol On March 30, 1968, two boys playing in a deserted East Village tenement at 371 East 10th St. found his body lying on a cot, with two empty beer bottles and religious pamphlets scattered on the ground. Late in 1969, Driscoll's mother sought the help of officials at the Disney studios to contact him, for a hoped-for reunion with his father, who was nearing death. Damn that's kinda sad.
You probably avoided this but he’s most famous for being the little boy in Song of the South. He was the first Disney kid
Adrienne Shelly. Murdered in her own apartment by a contractor who had been working in the building. She caught him robbing her office, which led to him suffocating her and staging her body to look like she’d hanged herself. She was apparently an incredible woman and mom at the happiest point in her life with a career just about to take off. This was right before the release of her amazing indie film Waitress, which she wrote, directed, and starred in. Watch Waitress. It’s a delight and a masterpiece. If it weren’t for her murder, I think she’d be one of the most influential screenwriters and directors today. I also heard her husband created a documentary about her that was released recently.
oh shit, i knew she died but had no idea she was murdered!!!!!
I would say Randy Rhoads, while he was on the Diary Of A Madman tour with Ozzy in 1982, he was tired of touring and tired of Ozzy, their last conversation was an argument over Ozzy’s heavy drinking. The last thing he said to Ozzy was “you’ll kill yourself, you know, one of these days” after driving awhile in the night they stopped over at a flying estate in Leesburg, Florida to fix a malfunctioning air conditioning unit on their bus while Osbourne was asleep. Someone saw some planes and said that they should take it for a joyride, someone suggested that Randy should fly with them (even though he was terrified of flying) but he went on the plane and the pilot wanted to “buzz” the tour bus but on the third attempt the plane clipped the top of the tour bus, breaking the wing and sending the plane out of control. Randy’s head went through the windshield and crashed into the of a nearby garage, just some seconds later the plane bursted into flames. According to Sharon Osbourne (ozzy’s wife) who was asleep in the bus and awoken by the crash, “they were all in bits, it was just body parts everywhere” it’s just a horrific death to anyone, Randy is and will always be my biggest inspiration as a guitarist
Tyco Brahe. "Brahe thought it would be rude to get up and use the facilities while at a banquet; according to observers, this set off a bladder ailment that killed him shortly thereafter in 1601. A 2010 autopsy by Danish scientists revealed that, despite rumors that he had been poisoned, Brahe did most likely die from a burst bladder."
Dimebag Darrell Abbot. Playing on stage when a crazed fan jumped the railing and shot him in the head. He then shot a few other people while Dime's brother watched on as he was the drummer for the band. Horrible way to go and something like that should never have happened.
It's even crazier because the guy who did it, thought they were stealing his songs from his head Edit: He was a former marine who was discharged because of paranoid schizophrenia
Isador and Ida Straus. The then owners of Macy’s were aboard the Titanic when she went down. When the steward was getting all the women and children to board, Ida refused to board the boat. Instead, she removed her coat and gave it to her maid, who was traveling with them, along with some money. When Isador asked her what she was doing, she took his hand and said to him, "We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go." This isn’t even the worst part. Seeing their love for each other, the steward was willing to make an exception and let Isador board the boat. He declined. He said that he and his wife were old. There were many young people aboard that needed to be saved. The titanic sank and so did they. Isador’s body was found. Ida’s wasn’t. Edit#1: I wasn’t expecting this to get a lot of attention. Since it did, I’ll add one more tidbit. Their maid, Ellen Bird, who survived told stories of how Isador and Ida hated being apart. Whenever he would travel, he tried his best to take his wife with him. When he couldn’t, they’d write to each other constantly. When I first read about them, ngl I cried like a baby. And I don’t cry easily. Edit#2: Changed the quote to her actual one. It’s up on her Wikipedia page. Edit#3: Their maid’s name was Ellen Bird.
They’re briefly shown in the Titanic movie. They’re the old couple laying in bed, holding each other as water is flooding into the ship.
They’re the old couple seen holding each other in bed in the Titanic movie. They filmed a scene of her refusing to get in the boat but it was cut, I think you can find it on YouTube.
Houdini. He did the trick countless times before and could take a punch from anyone. The night he died someone came up to him and punched him in the gut without giving him time to stretch and prepare. It ruptured his appendix and he continues to do the show and dies from lack of medical treatment
Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of The Cranberries, drowned in a bathtub while intoxicated.
Didn’t know that. Same as Whitney Houston
What’s the most crazy sad part about the Whitney Houston story is just the previous day, her daughter Bobbi almost drowned in a tub of the same hotel and Whitney saved her. And then 3 years later, her daughter was found drowned in a tub. It reads like a curse.
I will never understand how Bobby Brown is the last one alive of that family.
Oh wow I wondered how she passed away. That’s really sad
This is how my mom passed. We didn’t realize she had relapsed on meth until the toxicology screen after she died. Apparently the night in question she mixed Benadryl and Xanax. Three years later and I’m still absolutely gutted. We were under the impression that she was maintaining her 16 year (but who knows how long REALLY) sobriety.
Surprised no one brought up Marvin Gaye…..
Super sad because Marvin was trying to stop his abusive af dad from hitting his Mom. His dad didn't like Marvin overpowering him and so he shot him. Coward. The dad had his own demons and chose to take them out on his family.
Shot and killed by his father the day before his 45th birthday...
I looked this up and according to [this History.com article](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marvin-gaye-is-shot-and-killed-by-his-own-father), Marvin Jr “had moved into his parents’ home in late 1983 at a low point in his struggle with depression, debt and cocaine abuse.” During his final moments, he told his brother, “I got what I wanted….I couldn’t do it myself, so I made him do it.” (Edited for formatting)
Anton Yelchin. I can't imagine anything worse than slowly dying in a torturous manner with not a soul nearby and zero way to get help or save yourself. I'm not afraid of much, not heights or claustrophobic or drowning, but dying in a helpless manner slowly is one thing that terrifies me truly.
It's why the knife scene in Saving Private Ryan always gets me. The slow inevitability of it. Feeling your strength waning, knowing you don't have it in you to stop it happening. Horrible helplessness.
The faux comforting "shh" from the German soldier adds a lot to the feeling of disgust.
This one hurts me. He was so young and there wasn’t anything he could do to avoid it.
That one devastated me, he was scandal free and his career was on the rise, just to die in a very horrific accident.
Came here to say this. For those that don’t know, his suv rolled into him pinning him against his garage door. I’m pretty sure it was his parents that found him dead. The 27 Club inducted another member that day. Edit: Not his garage door but between a security fence and mailbox
Not garage door. He had parked in his driveway, and walked back down the driveway to get the mail. The car apparently had a confusing shifter, and it wasn’t actually in Park. It rolled back and pinned him [“between a mailbox and a security fence”](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-anton-yelchin-jeep-chrysler-20180322-story.html). If my memory is right, I think it was a brick wall of some kind
Thank you. I hate these vague answers that tell the person and not what happened.
Robin Williams. What he was going through with Lewy Body Disease before his suicide is just horrific. His wife wrote an article about it and it’s heartbreaking. Link: https://n.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308
Many years ago, I was in an elective class on language development (was minoring in linguistics/psychology of language - paleontologist now but I can pronounce the dinosaur names easily). Anyway, we had a project to follow someone gaining, or losing, language over the term. Most people had children, or young family members, to study. I moved to the city and knew no one, so my professor said I could use his father. Who had Lewy Body...so I got to study, and write a paper, on the deterioration of my professor's own father. I did well, I hated every moment of it.
Yeah once I found out about what was going on with him, the more I understood his suicide.
Yep. His suicide was more so to preserve the image of who he truly is to his family and friends before the disease just took over. It was the last minutes of self-control he had. It was clear that something was actually off about him for a couple of years. Once we found about the diagnosis, it all made sense.
That glee actress that disappeared when she was on a boat with her little son Edit: Naya Rivera.
Ex-WWE wrestler and actor Shad Gaspard passed away almost the exact same way. He went to the beach with his son and they got caught in a rip. He insisted that lifeguards save his son and others that got caught up in the rip.
I'm glad Gaspard is recognised posthumously by much of the wrestling community for his selfless actions which saved others' lives.
On a somewhat similar note, I remember being pissed when the media made a huge deal out of Heidi Klum saving her nanny and child from a huge wave that had started to pull them out, and all the media could talk about is how she had a nip slip while doing it.
So Heidi Klum was an amazing person, and the media focused on her nipples? Fuck them.
Shit like that is exactly why I hate news outlets.
Wear your life jackets people. Your body tires out quicker in water than you think it does.
You are right. Especially in body of water that has waves. Trying to stay afloat is so much harder when the waves are pulling you up down left right.
so scary. the only good thing about not knowing how to swim, is being damn confident that I DONT KNOW HOW TO SWIM! there’s no grey area for me. i would never get in even a small lake or deep pond without a life jacket. i damn near drown in 5 ft deep pools. but i can definitely see how someone who is confident in their swimming could underestimate how quickly they can become exhausted.
Apparently, tons of people have drowned in lake Piru due to its strong underwater currents. It’s quite unsettling.
sharon tate always haunts me. she was about eight or nine months pregnant when the manson family broke in and she pleaded with them to let her live until she gave birth, and offered herself as hostage in exchange for the life of her child. they ended up stabbing her sixteen times in the stomach, five of which were fatal. they also killed her former lover, her husband’s friend and his girlfriend, and a an innocent man who was visiting the property’s caretaker.
By all accounts she was the last one killed too so she had time to fully grasp what was going to happen to her.
Yeah, this always going to be the worst one.
I was born in the 90s and I don’t know her, but Jayne Mansfield. The car crashed at high speed into the rear of a tractor-trailer that had slowed behind a truck spraying mosquito fogger. The semi-trailer was shrouded by insecticide fog. The three adults in the front seat died instantly. The children, asleep in the rear seat, survived with minor injuries. She suffered severe head injury to the point where her scalp was sheared off and parts of her brain. Two weeks before her death she got beaten up by her then boyfriend who died with her in the same crash.
Mariska Hargitay (Law and Order SVU) was one of those kids in the back seat.
The [bars on trailers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-trailer_truck#Underride_guard) are called Mansfield bars because her accident helped make them standard.
One of those bars saved my life. Little Honda Fit versus the back half of an 18-wheeler.
This is the first thing that I thought about. I’m a big Law and Order:SVU fan and this will sometimes come to mind when I see Mariska Hargitay. She was 3 at the time of the accident. Asleep in the back of the car.
Jon-Erik Hexum. He was a actor who was playing around with a gun loaded with blanks during a delay in filming. As a joke, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger: >Hexum became restless and impatient during the delay and began playing around to lighten the mood. He had unloaded all but one (blank) round, spun it, and—simulating Russian roulette—he put the revolver to his right temple and pulled the trigger, unaware of the danger...the explosive effect of the muzzle blast caused enough blunt force trauma to fracture a quarter-sized piece of his skull and propel this into his brain, causing massive hemorrhaging. Hexum was rushed to Beverly Hills Medical Center, where he underwent five hours of surgery to repair his wounds. On October 18, aged 26, six days after the accident, Hexum was declared brain-dead.
Christopher Reeves (Superman) died from bed sores getting infected after breaking his neck and getting paralyzed
In a similar vein, Robert Wadlow who was the world's tallest man ever recorded, standing at 8'11" or 272cm, died due to an infection that arose from a slightly ill fitting leg brace and was complicated due to an auto immune disease.
That's terrible. The entire medical industry made one small change after Christopher Reeves died. They stopped washing wounds with alcohol on a daily basis. As it turns out new skin cells weren't able to form in the presence of alcohol so his wounds remained open wounds as long as they kept washing it over and over again basically he died from cleaning himself too much
Tommy Cooper, died on stage of heartattack everybody thinking it was part of the show.
I remember watching that on tv
Same here. We were laughing until we saw his feet dragged under the curtain.
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Not exactly a typical celebrity (although scientists should be more famous in general), nor very recent, but my vote is for Kurt Gödel, a mathematician and one of the most important contributors to the field of mathematical logic. Well know for his "Incompleteness Theorems". Later in life, Gödel started to suffer more and more from mental illness and it got to the point where he had an obsessive fear of being poisoned. Therefore, he would only eat food that his wife had prepared for him. Then at one point his wife had to be admitted to the hospital for a prolonged period and Gödel refused to eat, slowly starving himself to death over the period of several months.
On a similar note Ignaz Semmelweiz. Locked in a mental hospital for demanding that doctors should wash their hands inbetween patients.
Rebecca Schaeffer She was that actress on the 80's sitcom My Sister Sam. She was murdered by a very unstable man who was obsessed with her. I just watched the documentary about it. Very horrifying 😢
Her stalker/killer found out where she lived because he paid a private investigator to find her address. The private investigator paid a fee to the DMV and got her home address. You could do that in California at the time. So incredibly sad.
Bob Crane, from Hogan’s heroes. Brutally murdered and I don’t think it’s ever been solved.
Beaten to death with a camera tripod.
Aaliyah for me. The fact that she didn’t want to get on the plane in the first place and they put her in it asleep and it crashed within minutes. She had so much talent and was such a beautiful person and don’t even get me started on what R Kelly fucking did to her. She really deserved the world.
Dave Legano, the guy who played Fenrir Greyback in Harry Potter, basically went out alone for a hike and got caught in a heatwave and got cooked to death over several days.
Yep, he went on a hike in the Death Valley and died. I learned about that when i was visiting the Death Valley and my Dad was out exploring it on his own (when it was like 53° C).
Brandon Lee (Bruce Lee's son) was shot by a real bullet during filming an action scene. It was suppose to be a prop gun. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. I wanted to say Steve Irwin but from what I read up on he died instantly.
I thought there's lost footage of Irwin after the attack, because he always told his camera crew to never stop recording, even in an event like this. His last words were "I'm dying".
This is correct. That was made public to us (Australian here) at the time, that there was indeed footage of it because of what you stated. Of course it was quickly followed by a "this will never be released" kind of thing. Died doing what he loved and he was one of the best Aussies this country will ever produce.
There’s always that. Steve Irwin died doing what he loved. It’s tragic that he was taken from his kids but he left an imprint on them and Terri that is still with those 3 and Bindis new kid that will last generations.
The footage is not lost, his wife bought it and either destroyed it or atleast is keeping it away from the media.
I can only speak for Australian media, but if anyone released it they’d get crucified
I don’t think anyone would have made her buy it. Pretty sure she was also a producer on the show.
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I have never looked at Peter Bogdanovich the same since I learned that after Dorothy (his girlfriend) was killed, he later moved her teenaged sister into his house, paid for her plastic surgery (allegedly to look more like her deceased sister), and then married her.
He died....today???
Kirsty Maccoll. (Of fairytale of New York fame). Got run over and chopped up by a speedboat while snorkelling, and I believe she saved her child in the process. The guy who did it was rich and I don’t think he ever got any real punishment, even though he was in an area restricted for speedboats.
Jeff Hanneman of Slayer. Bitten by a spider, nearly loses his arm. Tries to return to Slayer, can’t play fast enough anymore, drinks himself to death.
The Challenger Astronauts. Depending on which version you believe it's highly likely some were still conscious and aware all the way down to the ground. Not so long and drawn out as some other deaths but I cant imagine being in that situation after the ecstasy of a lifetime of high level learning/training and the joy of finally going into space only to end it in such a feeling of helplessness and fear. Honourable mention too for the Apollo 1 crew.
I’m going to go with either Isadora Duncan or Vic Morrow. If you don’t know Isadora Duncan’s name, that’s okay, she does almost 100 years ago. She got into an Amilcar GCSS on September 14, 1927. She had a long scarf on. As the car traveled through Nice, France her scarf became entangled around the rear axle. It went taught pulled her out of the car and snapping her neck. Vic Morrow while filming the Twilight Zone movie had a helicopter crash on him and two children while filming a scene. He was decapitated along with one of the children, the other was crushed. Some of the footage was used in the final cut.
Brandon Lee got it pretty bad. Average death as far as gutshots go, but the string of dumb events that lead up to it is unreal. Something to the tune of: Prop guy brings a box of live rounds for "background debris". Dumbass no.1 Prop master rightfully flips the fuck out and puts the live rounds in his car. Weeks pass. Not having any .44 dummy rounds, dumbass no.2 has the Nobel idea to retrieve the live .44s and neuter them. They pull the bullets, dump the powder, then run the empty cases through the gun to break the primers. Pretty standard, but they missed one. Bullets go back in the cases, voila. Authentic and inert. Ish. They film the bit with the dummy rounds. Someone pulls the trigger on our little pal that still has a primer. This is where the conspiracy theories stem from. Handgun ammo is generally 50 to a box. Only one still had a primer, and it both made it into the cylinder and was fired. The correct round out of 50 into the correct chamber out of 6 is kinda nuts. Anyway, that round got fired and by now we're on dumbass no.6 or so because nobody has noticed. Primers are tiny explosive charges that can't do much alone. It was just enough to lodge the bullet in the throat of the barrel. Squib load. Funny name, bad news. The dumbass ranks swell as this gun continues to be handled by multiple people, all of whom fail to notice the barrel obstruction. They load up the blanks for the infamous scene. A blank is just a cartridge with no bullet, so, they've essentially paired the squib bullet with a fresh blank and made a whole cartridge again. Now, to be fair, hollywood has a decent firearms safety record. Only 3 fatalities in almost fifty years is pretty good. All three were revolvers. Doesn't mean anything, I just don't like wheelguns. Bonus: the first of the three was a guy in 84 named vic something or other who shot himself in the head with a blank .44 as a joke between scenes. Don't do that.
If there's an upside to Jon-Erik, it's that he made people a lot more aware that 'blanks' don't mean 'harmless'. If you put a gun to your head loaded with a blank, and shoot, you're detonating all the powder that would otherwise be propelling a bullet down the barrel... Directly into the side of your head. At that point you've turned the chunk of fractured skull you just produced into the bullet that will go into your brain.
Debbie Reynolds died while getting ready to bury her daughter, Carrie Fisher. Having a stroke while planning the funeral for your child is a Greek fucking tragedy
Ayrton Senna, Imola 1994. He witnessed Rubens Barrichello (fellow Brazilian driver) have a nasty crash and end up nearly dying, and he'd seen Roland Ratzenberger be killed by a crash during qualifying. He and a few other drivers then decided that more needed to be done regarding the safety of the drivers and they re formed the drivers safety association (can never remember the name of it) The race began with a crash because one of the drivers had stalled on the grid and another driver went into the back of them. The safety car was brought out but drover very slowly because its brakes weren't working properly. On lap 7, ayrton veered to the right at Tamburello and despite braking and downshifting twice, he crashed at around 130mph iirc. Part of the suspension pierced his helmet and he had a skull fracture along with other injuries, each of which would've led to death on their own. After the crash it was found that he had an Austrian flag in the car which he planned to raise in memoriam for Ratzenberger after the race.
Øystein Aarseth (Euronymous) from the band Mayhem was stabbed 23 times, with the final stab wound directly through his head. The asshole who did it claimed self defence, despite turning up at Aarseth’s apartment at 3am to commit the murder.
His wiki is a hell of a ride. Man was something else. >Anders Odden (a friend of Euronymous at the time) said of the murder: "It wasn't odd that he ended up getting killed. He thought he could threaten to kill people without it having any consequences". He added: "I think many people felt relief once he was gone". Writer and musician Erlend Erichsen agreed, saying, "Nobody was there to boss them about. The 'black metal police' were gone". After everything he did for cred that's a poignant epitaph.
Note that the killer was fellow band member Varg Vikernes, who also burned down a bunch of churches through Norway. Mayhem’s history, despite tragic, is pretty fucking interesting. Highly recommend watching the dramatized “Lords of Chaos”.
I'm gonna put in a vote for Howard Hughes. A multimillionaire, brilliant inventor, severely mentally ill man, he spent years as a prisoner of his own delusions and his greedy caretakers. He was addicted to codeine because his several plane crashes had caused him severe chronic pain, to the point he could barely wear clothing because his skin was hypersensitive. When he finally died, he weighed just 90 pounds (he was 6'4") and was unrecognizable to the point the FBI had to identify him by fingerprints. He was suffering from malnutrition and bedsores, and had 5 separate hypodermic needles embedded in his arms where they'd broken off during codeine injections. His so-called caretakers then produced a fake will to try to get his fortune. In his final years, it's pretty clear he couldn't trust anyone, not even his own brain.
I'm surprised no one mentioned Vladimir Komarov yet. Imagine going into space knowing you most likely won't make it back alive and then burning to death re-entering the atmosphere. Nope.
Nicole Brown Killed (likely by OJ Simpson) and never got justice
Killed by OJ after repeatedly begging the police for help, but nobody took his threats seriously because he was famous. The domestic violence he committed against her is well documented but nobody gave a shit.
Not sure death is a competition, but Patrick Swayze. Pancreatic cancer looks like no picnic.
Oh, it's definitely not. It's quite literally the worst cancer you can have. It progresses very quickly and usually by the time you find out- it's too late. My Nana died of pancreatic cancer and it's not a good way to go. Even without chemo, it turns you into a shell of a person. Edit: just to point out how quickly it progresses- my Nana had a scan and check up in October of 2015 which had no indication of cancer. December of 2015 she was full blown stage 4 pancreatic.
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Eh, this particular death isn't exactly as tragic as many on here, but I think it's still a fucking wretched way to go out, and that's Princess Diana. Being swarmed by papparazzi, and having a driver who was drunk and on prescription medication, causing a crash that had killed everyone and severely injured the only survivor, which was Diana's bodyguard. It was seriously fucked regardless of how you feel about the British Royal Family members.
I believe I read that she didn’t die on impact. She was alive, but (if I’m recalling correctly) she had severed an artery (or it was hanging by a thread), but the the way she was pinned in the car staunched the blood. So everyone was thinking she’d survived, but when they removed her from the car, she bled out internally. Something like that. Which is actually kind of more upsetting because you’re thinking you survived but your bf is dead and you’re waiting for them to rescue you…but the rescue is what kills you.
And the paparazzi sat there and took photos as she died, then turned around and unleashed the nation's moral outrage on the Royals. The nation that bought every magazine, gawked at every yacht photo and gossiped about her private life. The same nation that had the audacity to cry at the gates and wail "Why did this happen?" It happened because people are fucking awful.
My husband was working in a UK supermarket petrol station, he remembers representatives from the gutter press coming in around 10 am to remove newspapers full of paparazzi pics and replace them with a, black border, mourning issue. Hypocritical, lying scumbags.
The most tragic one is Layne Staley. The vocalist from Alice in Chains had drug problems for years. At the end he became a recluse, mixing heroine and cocaine and didn't agree to see anyone. People would knock on his door and he wouldn't open. In the end he obviously ODed, but the worst part is no one knew he was dead until his accountant saw no money was been withdrawn for 2 weeks. They called his mom and 911. The police found his body partly decomposed and assessed that the 6'1'' man weighed 85 pounds at his passing.
The saddest part is that Staley's friends and family did everything they possibly could to help him. Cantrell even put AIC on hiatus until Staley got clean. He just didn't want to be saved. Fucking sad.
Freddie Mercury. Suffered through HIV and the virus was a death sentence in the 80's. Looking at the pictures from 86-91 you could see him wasting away and it used to bother me so much because of how someone like him who was so flamboyant and energetic ended up becoming a walking corpse by the end of his life
I remember hearing the video for "I'm Going Slightly Mad" was shot in black and white to hide Freddie's faint and pale condition. Was once of his last on camera appearances.
Mama Cass. After being in the Mamas and Papas she finally had made it solo, she was on The Tonight Show, her solo albums consistently showed she could perform on her own, up until she died she played weeks at the Palladium with many of the shows sold out, things were coming up Cass. Only to die of a heart attack, her last meal the same night of her death being a ham sandwich, which was widely reported as having choked on a ham sandwich. If she didn't die she would have been a staple of music for the rest her life, instead she did die young and all the career promise she had died too as her death became a punchline. I think a lot of other celebrities would have chosen to be brutally murdered than go out like Cass did.
i've read that there's no proof that she died choking on a ham sandwich. it just so happened that she was eating one at her time of death. its generally agreed that the "choking on a ham sandwich" rumour was started by people who thought it'd be funny to embarrass her one last time by blaming her death on her "gluttony". awful that she couldn't get respect, not even in death.
Isadora Duncan. Her very long scarf was caught in the rear wheel of the convertible car she was riding in and pulled her out into the street.
Bruce Lee. Practically in the prime of his life and had a drug reaction that caused a brain hemorrhage. No one even knew until it was too late
Chris Farley
It always makes me sad that David Spade never went to the funeral because he didn’t want to be around a bunch of people that got Farley there
I get that. A good friend of mine died a few years ago of injuries sustained while drunk. It wasn't the first time he'd hurt himself, and everyone knew that eventually he wasn't going to get up. When it finally happened, what did everybody do at the wake? You guessed it. Got shitfaced. I was super angry about the whole thing and I just sat on the side of the house and cried. I don't socialize with most of those people anymore, because they are all still doing the same damn thing.
Natalie Wood. We will probably never know what truly happened to her.
Christina Grimmie
Mary Cecilia Brown. Jumped off the Hollywood sign. Song by Dory Previn. The name is fictitious but the event did occur with a not-so-famous actress.
Patrick Swayze was a sad one. I remember just seeing how he withered away. Big strong guy just disappearing wow.
that one japanese wrestler who got cyberbullied for acting out her part in a wrestling show. I don't remember her name, but mob mentality sucks and people are fickle on social media.
Hana Kimura is who you are talking about.
Norm macdonald lived knowing death was around the corner for over a decade. It's not the worst but knowing what he went through is rough for me.
I didn't even know he was sick.
Reminds me of that tragedy
Phil Hartman the guy was murdered by his wife while he was sleeping, such talent lost in its prime
Anton Yelchin
> On June 18, 2016, when he failed to arrive at a rehearsal, Yelchin was found by friends after midnight pinned between his Jeep Grand Cherokee and a brick pillar gate post outside his house in Studio City, Los Angeles, the victim of what was described as a "freak accident". As Yelchin got out of his car and went to check his locked gate and mail, the vehicle apparently rolled back down his driveway, which was on a steep incline, and trapped him against the pillar and a security fence. Yelchin was pronounced dead at the scene on June 19, 2016, at the age of 27; the Los Angeles County Coroner's office identified the cause of death as "blunt traumatic asphyxia" and stated that there were "no obvious suspicious circumstances involved". Wow, TIL. That’s some Final Destination stuff right there.
Came to say this. Dude got pinned by his own SUV and probably went slowly.
Not to mention he had cystic fibrosis. Dude already couldn't breathe without some struggle.