Today’s Playful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Megan Duskey was looking forward to a Halloween night out in Chicago with some of her best friends. The Chicago schoolteacher and a group of girlfriends she had known most of her life had scored tickets to a sold-out Haunted Hotel Ball at the Palmer House Hilton, and Duskey was going as glamorous superhero Silk Spectre from the movie “Watchmen.” Duskey, 23, and her friends were there half an hour on Saturday night (October 30, 2010) when she playfully attempted to slide down a banister rail and fell four stories to her death. “We had just gotten there,” said Ellie Pessetto, a friend of Duskey’s from childhood who had stepped away from the stairwell moments before Duskey fell. When Pessetto returned to the stairs, she saw two of her friends crumpled to the floor, in hysterics. “I couldn’t even understand what they were saying,” Pessetto said. “Then someone said (Megan) fell.” A cousin of Duskey’s had raced down the stairs and was holding Duskey’s body when firefighters arrived, Pessetto said. Later, they noticed a mark on the cousin’s arm where firefighters had had to pull her away from Duskey. “(The cousin) just said, ‘She’s gone.’ She knew she was gone,” Pessetto said. The medical examiner said Duskey died instantly of head trauma. Alcohol was not a factor in the accident.
Culled from: The Chicago Tribune
The moral of this story, kids: Sliding on banister rails is never a good idea, but it is especially ill-conceived when a loss of balance results in plunging four stories.
Some people… They gotta do everything to the extreme. Can’t just slide down a bannister, oh no! THey have to get as high up as they can.
Very surprised alcohol wasn’t a factor. It’s just the kind of stunt a drunk would try to perform.
You know, I don’t think a lot of people today realize that stuff can actually kill you. Most people are rarely exposed to death nowadays other than in nursing homes and horror movies, so they don’t use common sense about the possible consequences of things like this. Slide down a banister four stories up? Sure, why not! What could possibly go wrong? Then, of course, when things do go wrong, everybody is shocked and devastated. I wonder if her friends knew about her plans beforehand.
Anyway, sorry for the rant…
@Brooke
And she was a teacher, too.
Sometimes I think, and I’m not all that old, that people are becoming idiots, in the clinical sense of the word. My dictionary defines idiot as, among other things, somebody who cannot protect himself from common danger.
@Aimee
Yeah, I forgot about that part.
I agree. Every time I start to think most people really can’t be that dumb, seems like somebody goes out of their way to prove me wrong. And I’m pretty sure my generation is the dumbest of them all. Oh well. At least we can read MFDJ and be entertained by some of them.
And by ‘some of them’, I mean idiots. The Comtesse’s facts are always entertaining. 🙂
One of the many reasons the MFDJ is so enjoyable is because of the big dose of “Better them than me.”