Morbid Fact Du Jour For January 24, 2010
Today’s Fiery Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
A woman out for jog while listening to her iPod had her legs severed by a freight train because she may not have heard it coming. Cheryl Ann Risse, 32, was recovering at a hospital Friday, July 6, 2007. Authorities did not know how she ended up in the path of the train Thursday morning, but rescue workers speculated she did not hear the locomotive coming because she was listening to her iPod. Risse often jogged across the tracks on her way to a nearby park. The train engineer didn’t know he had struck Risse until he returned along the same tracks minutes later. A passing sheriff’s deputy noticed her waving her arms. “My feet are on fire,” she told Tony Long, a battalion chief for Pompano Beach Fire-Rescue, who responded to the scene. “Do you think you can put the fire out? They’re really hurting.” The woman was expected to survive.
Culled from: WFTV.Com
Generously submitted by: Dark Paradox
Of course, anyone who jogs on railroad tracks with headphones on is an automatic Darwin Award Winner. And that’s a fire that no amount of water will extinguish! But on the bright side – she doesn’t need to get up early to go jogging anymore. That must be a relief!
Oh, and speaking of people falling in front of public transit, video of a man falling under a Chicago Transit Authority bus was released the other day. (The family is suing the CTA for negligence in running him over.) Take a look and tell me – is the CTA to blame here, or the man himself?
Video Shows Man Struck, Killed by CTA Bus
No more jogging. I love to start the week with a nice cup of irony.
There’s no accounting for the strange ways of joggers.
HOnestly, she must have been so into her runner’s high that she didn’t see the train or feel it. I’ve been near railraod tracks, (not quite that near) and I can attest that the thunder of an approaching train can be felt easily, even if you don’t hear it.
There was a show on A&E years ago, when I was in college, where Bill Kurtis illustrated how people of otherwise good sense just seem to turn to morons around railroad tracks. The lights are flashing, the bells are ringing, the gate is coming down, this mile-long freight (yes, some of the big ones are even longer than that) is barreling toward them, and they still think they can beat it across the tracks, or that if they can’t, the train can stop in time to avoid them. A train needs FIVE MILES to come to a complete stop, depending on its speed and size.
Can you tell I don’t have any romantic notions about choo-choo trains?
Also, Darling COmtesse of Morbidity, in the strictest sense, you can only win a Darwin Award if you are killed, or possibly if you are rendered unable to reproduce. But I say we bend the rules to include losers like Cheryl Legs o’ Fire. (Starts playing “Chariots of Fire” here)
I lived right next to the BN/SF line that serviced the Coors Brewery…Believe me, you know when a train is coming!!! Once I saw the jr. high kids crawling under a train that was stopped and in their way. There is little hope for our species…
And the sad thing, if one of those idiotic junior-high kids was to get hurt or killed doing that, it would be the train crew who would have been blamed by the parents and probably the media as well, because “Kids do stupid things, they don’t know any better, they think nothing will hurt them.” *eye roll*
$1.00 says she files a lawsuit against Apple for this: It’s the American way.
No, no, you’ve put the money ont he wrong lawsuit! More likely she’ll sue the railroad and possibly the fire company for not saving her legs.