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Is This Coincidence, Fate... Or Something Else?

Maybe you should actually roll on the floor laughing so that people know that you are not serious.
 
That sounds like good exercise. I'll do it!
Thanks!
 
I also have a number of customers who pride themselves on their 'dry wit'. Trouble is, until you know them well, they often just come over as very very rude.

So maybe use your dry wit only on those who are used to it. It's wasted on strangers, who will just go off shaking their heads...
 
I inherited some dry wit from a few ancestors, but learned pretty quickly that using it sparingly is best. Actually, I got tired of people thinking I was a dick when I thought I was making a really funny joke. It does not work well on the interwebz either. Animated dingbats (not the human kind) are far more effective there.

:dbana::bob::fetish::nelly::snoopnap:
 
Hello Ulalume

I've just found this thread again, as I originally read it long before I became a member of these boards and very recently its been nagging at me, and now I've found it again. I do hope you don't find it upsetting for me to be bringing it back into consciousness with my reply to you.

The feelings you had, and the coincidences/synchronicities are extremely interesting. And I'm very curious... did anything ever get resolved regarding the case? I completely understand if you still need to be vague about it :)
 
Only reading this now, I was going to ask the same...hope all is well.
 
Astonishing tale combining coincidence and fate:

In 1978, Vera Czermak of Prague, was devastated when she discovered her husband’s infidelity. In anger, she contemplated both suicide and murder. Eventually, she decided to end her life by leaping out of her third-floor balcony.
Unbeknown to her, her husband was walking back from work and was passing directly beneath the balcony at that moment, cushioning her fall.
She survived with comparatively minor injuries. The impact however killed the husband.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/04/scienceandnature.features
 
Astonishing tale combining coincidence and fate:

In 1978, Vera Czermak of Prague, was devastated when she discovered her husband’s infidelity. In anger, she contemplated both suicide and murder. Eventually, she decided to end her life by leaping out of her third-floor balcony.
Unbeknown to her, her husband was walking back from work and was passing directly beneath the balcony at that moment, cushioning her fall.
She survived with comparatively minor injuries. The impact however killed the husband.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/04/scienceandnature.features
Could it be proven that the fact that her husband was passing was 'unbeknown to her'?
 
Could it be proven that the fact that her husband was passing was 'unbeknown to her'?
It certainly does sound too good (bad?) to be true.
Do a search on Vera Czermak of Prague though and you'll find multiple accounts, all of which seem to concur on the core story (which I posted above).
I didn't find any report claiming she knew the cheating husband was directly below the balcony and deliberately targeted him when she jumped.
 
It certainly does sound too good (bad?) to be true.
Do a search on Vera Czermak of Prague though and you'll find multiple accounts, all of which seem to concur on the core story (which I posted above).
I didn't find any report claiming she knew the cheating husband was directly below the balcony and deliberately targeted him when she jumped.
But presumably if she did admit that she knew he was underneath, she could be prosecuted for murder? Or manslaughter at the least, since she survived. So it would be in her interests to say that she had no idea.
 
But presumably if she did admit that she knew he was underneath, she could be prosecuted for murder? Or manslaughter at the least, since she survived. So it would be in her interests to say that she had no idea.
But if you wanted to hurt/kill your husband would you jump out of a 3rd story window at huge risk to yourself to achieve it?

Reminds me of another unlikely [fictional] scenario posed as an insurance question. Can’t remember the details now but it was quite convoluted & I think it involved someone getting shot in a freak accident.

I’m making this up now but imagine someone jumps out of the 13th floor to top themself but on the way down is shot by someone on the 8th floor in a freak occurrence - a gun goes off when someone's cleaning it. His insurance doesn’t pay out on a suicide. Does his wife collect as he’s murdered on the way down? Does the accidental shooter get charged with manslaughter?

Something along those lines anyway.
 
But presumably if she did admit that she knew he was underneath, she could be prosecuted for murder? Or manslaughter at the least, since she survived. So it would be in her interests to say that she had no idea.
I think it would be very difficult to judge exactly when to jump from several storeys up to guarantee you hit a moving target (if in fact hubby was walking passed).
 
But if you wanted to hurt/kill your husband would you jump out of a 3rd story window at huge risk to yourself to achieve it?

Reminds me of another unlikely [fictional] scenario posed as an insurance question. Can’t remember the details now but it was quite convoluted & I think it involved someone getting shot in a freak accident.

I’m making this up now but imagine someone jumps out of the 13th floor to top themself but on the way down is shot by someone on the 8th floor in a freak occurrence - a gun goes off when someone's cleaning it. His insurance doesn’t pay out on a suicide. Does his wife collect as he’s murdered on the way down? Does the accidental shooter get charged with manslaughter?

Something along those lines anyway.

This is a story that's been going around for decades. It's sometimes presented as a legal conundrum for law students.
Here's an example from a Canadian university website -

1994's MOST BIZARRE SUICIDE

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Science, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story.

"On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound of the head.

The decedent had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide (he left a note indicating his despondency). As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him instantly.

Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide anyway because of this."

"Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "a person who sets out to commit suicide ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended.


That Opus was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide.

But the fact that his suicidal intent would not have been successful caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands.

"The room on the ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing and he was threatening her with the shotgun.

He was so upset that, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the a window striking Opus.

"When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B.

When confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded.

The old man said it was his long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun.

He had no intention to murder her -therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.

"The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal incident.

It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.

The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.

There was an exquisite twist.

"Further investigation revealed that the son [Ronald Opus] had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a ninth story window.

"The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide."
 
But if you wanted to hurt/kill your husband would you jump out of a 3rd story window at huge risk to yourself to achieve it?
I suspect that suicide was probably her intent, but if she saw her husband coming along (and she hated him sufficiently to be considering taking her own life because of his behaviour), then it would probably be worth a punt, wouldn't it?

Then, on finding you'd survived but he had been killed, you'd have to say that your intent was purely suicide and you didn't see him, to avoid some very awkward questioning.
 
I suspect that suicide was probably her intent, but if she saw her husband coming along (and she hated him sufficiently to be considering taking her own life because of his behaviour), then it would probably be worth a punt, wouldn't it?

Then, on finding you'd survived but he had been killed, you'd have to say that your intent was purely suicide and you didn't see him, to avoid some very awkward questioning.
Well it’s possible, I’ll give it that..
 
Im pretty sure we had a version of this tale as part of our Criminal Law module at college, not sure that it was a shotgun in our version as they are unlikely to be found in a block of flats, possible an "old war souvenir" type of weapon.
 
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