Hmm. I’ll ask around. My self-defense trainer would have it differently (of course, he’s a self-defense trainer…).
yeah and i will too. that’s because two cop friends tell me that’s what they tell their daughters. also hear it innumerable times on the radio.
what they all tell me is fight when it’s clear they’re going to kill you.
And see movie #4 here: http://www.11points.com/TV/11_Fake_Movies_From_Seinfeld_That_Really_Need_To_Be_Made
Kind of a Rosie scenario.
In the 1970’s, my mother’s best friend, a woman then in her 40’s, was doing her best “dancing with the stars” imitation with a skilled showoff at a local dance. He spun her around and dipped her, and her head banged lightly on the floor. She was apparently ok, just a glancing bump, but collapsed and died a short time later of bleeding in the brain.
In the 1980’s, a former policeman friend of mine talked to the driver of a vehicle that had been in a minor traffic accident. The fellow said he was fine, had only a sore chest, and refused ambulance transport to the hospital. He answered my friend’s questions for several minutes, then reluctantly agreed to go to the hospital for a quick check. An hour later, my friend went to the hospital to get some more information. He asked the doctor if the guy was still there. “Yeah,” said the doctor, “He’s down in the morgue.” Autopsy showed a tiny bit of cartilage had been knocked loose from the sternum and propelled through the Aorta, causing a slow but inexorable leak. “If I’d had him on the table 5 minutes after it happened I couldn’t have saved him,” the doctor later told my friend. “Just one of those things.” I’ve heard many, many other examples of this kind of death.
As far as a “death touch” karate move, or some such, you wouldn’t be informed reliably of anything like that online, and in the event it would be related to the kind of stories I just related, above. It wouldn’t be as easy as it looked and you’d have to really know your business (otherwise it would have gone viral long ago and we’d have dead kids all over the street from trying it on each other).
There is a Russian practitioner of the Russian art of “SYSTEMA” whose video shows him utterly disabling huge and tough-looking opponents with a slight sidehand thump to the sternum, almost an offhand flyswatting. Some try manfully to “take” the blow; all fail. It’s not a killing blow but is an interesting example of knowing what you are doing.
Heheheheheh.
Cite for a well-documented case, although I doubt you could reliably cause that type of injury deliberately.
Yes, I thought of the famous example you cite. You are right that neither of the anecdotal cases I offer describe injury that could be reliably inflicted, let alone without some incriminating indication that human action caused the damage–although I suppose with no witnesses the source of the blow might remain a mystery, in the right circumstances. I once sat as juror on a 6 week, messy murder trial and I can tell you that forensic science is at the same time more and less impressive than advertised in TV drama.
My point was how easy it is to die from a seemingly minor injury, however, I’ve re-read your first post, and I think you are right: the querent is picking the collective Internet brain for writing material, not asking whether some secret death blow of the Thuggee exists undiscovered by CNN.
Under that somewhat different circumstance, I think I might direct him to something I heard on the Michael Savage radio show recently–not reliable, but good enough food for fictional thought.
Savage, who has a graduate degree in medical anthropology (among other things), was talking about how fragile life is, how you can die for no apparent reason that even a doctor can understand. In light of his comments, a nurse called in and gave the specific example of a lecture with visual aids she once received from an M.D. who was making the same essential point. This doctor said that one of the major heart arteries sometimes simply closes off, spasms, if I understood her correctly, killing the patient by a “heart attack” without any apparent cause that current medical science can understand.
A burgeoning mystery writer might look to that kind of baffling medical fact as a credible starting point for an undetectable murder technique.
That’s the first time I’ve heard that said out loud, but yeah. Best case: You get free. Worst case: He gets caught.
I read that and thought, “I didn’t know he had a radio show. *What *degree? No shit!”. Then I realized I was thinking of Dan Savage (gay sex-advice columnist).
This thread reminded me of a story my teacher told us back in driver’s ed. Guy gets in a wreck, nothing too traumatic but his car gets a good knock from the rear. He had his seatbelt on, though, and it wasn’t anything he shouldn’t have survived, no visible trauma, but he’s dead. So they do an autopsy and can’t find anything. His heart is fine, no drugs in his system, etc.
Finally, going over him inch by inch, they find a teeny blue dot on the back of his head. Finally they deduce that he had a blue kleenex box on that little shelf behind the backseat, under the rear-windshield, and when he got hit, the box flew forward and the corner struck the driver in the back of the head in just the exact right spot to kill him instantly.
The moral of the story was “don’t put anything up on your back windshield,” obviously, but I’ve always thought it sounded hokey. Anybody else ever hear this one? Any way any of it could be true?
Can a person die from one blow? Yes, but it is quite unlikely.
Can it be done in a way that forensics may not be able to detect? Possible, but highly unlikely.
Would a 77 year old woman be able to do such a thing? I CAN win the lottery!
Freak things can and do happen all the time, people succumb to brain hemorrhages from single blows on probably a (very sadly) daily basis. There are quite a few reports of party games of “shot-for-shot” ending badly, but this is a rare occurrence at best in the sum total of single blows delivered on any given day.
The best way to put it is simply: “anything can happen on fight night”
As aforementioned, a single blow to the trachea has the potential to be fatal, although it is very unlikely, especially in the course of a struggle.
Heart-stopping blows are possible, yes, but we are speaking of the infinitesimal at this point.
There is no “ninja death touch” whatsoever… There are occurrences where a single strike can cause death, but as discussed previously, if such a thing existed people would be dropping like flies left right and center.
It takes quite a massive amount of force to incapacitate a person, as well as perfect timing and aim. It happens all the time, but is quite a hard feat to accomplish reliably.
An amateur interest in MMA will easily prove these points, I shall show you some videos that will make you think death should have rightfully occurred, but all these folks are very much alive and well…
IANAD, but I’ve knocked out a few people in my day, I’ve also been hit over the head with a full, sealed bottle of Dom Perignon (for nothing!) knocked completely unconscious, and bled out of my ears for a couple days… I can tell you first hand, to deliver a killing blow in one shot is EXTREMELY F___ING RARE.
The chances of an elderly woman doing such a thing are very low.
To add, one could rupture an organ in one blow, but this too is highly improbable. Empty handed it is quite hard to “one-shot” a being of near-equal weight, especially when adrenaline is involved.
One hit? Requires something localized, dense, and fairly massive. We’re talking about smashing someone in the head with a hammer.
How could getting hit from the *rear *launch an object forward?
And there are some basic physics problems here, even before we try to see if a tissue box could kill you. First, the rear deck is usually below driver’s head level. If we suppose for minute that it’s not, for that object to leave the rear deck and hit the driver in the back of the head, it would have to be going very fast, otherwise gravity would pull it downward before it reached the driver’s head. The only way for that to happen would be a very sudden deceleration, as in hitting a concrete wall, or a head-on collision. Either of those would cause visible trauma to the occupants.
So setting the injury issue aside, the whole scenario sounds like bullshit to me.
Well, I had a similar experience in a car “crash” in Europe once, though I’m happy to report I survived it.
In my early 20’s, I was traveling with three friends in a VW bus in Switzerland; it was night, and we were tired. The driver was confused by European traffic signs at a “Y” shaped intersection as we approached up the stem of the “Y” (the driver was blind in one eye, too–teenage fistfight). He went straight, and doing about 15 mph hit a concrete block holding a sign at the apex of the “Y”. In the back of the bus, it looked and felt like a bomb had gone off, with everything imaginable flying through the air, mostly headed forward. A nearly empty, re-sealable beer bottle (Grolsch-type) flew off a rack at the very back of the bus and hit me in the back of the head: a glancing blow, bottlecap first. It did no apparent damage other than slight swelling and soreness the next day.
You may draw your own conclusion as to how lucky I was. Certainly, I can testify to the dynamic “flying object” truth of even a minor collision. How lethal any given object travelling at a given speed and striking a given point on the human body might be I cannot say with authority–alas, for the purposes of your question–having recovered completely.
I believe Mythbusters tried to replicate this. As I recall, their conclusion was that in a very high speed crash and worst case bad luck with the shape of the seat and the path of the object, something like a hammer might be able to cause some damage, but a tissue box, no way.
Yes. A strike with a fist can induce commotio cordis; not much force is required. It’s just that it requires freakish timing for a blow to send the heart into fibrillation, so it happens very, very rarely.
Like I said…
Yes, point taken. I read quickly and missed “a good knock from the rear.” I didn’t read your objection before I gave my “testimony.”
Our poor querent: We’ve wandered far from his question.
Here’s my best advice to him: bottom line. If it were me, and I was really serious about finding the information for a book or story, not just wikipedia curious, I would research medical mystery stories and odd accidents (at the high end, not in "Believe it or Not). I would steer clear of celebrity M.E. autobiographies and celebrity death cases and stick strictly to factual medical information of the sort doctors discuss among themselves. I’d try to talk to physiologists, someone in a specific field that might relate to death and injury, like sports medicine, and I’d try to talk to people with many years of experience, like police, firemen, E.R. personnel, and coroners. After I had a small selection of the most intriguing examples I’d work on the details of how someone with a character’s particular qualities might construct a result while attempting, with absolute determination, to avoid detection.
A big problem will be motive and credibility–your own. People you approach directly are going to want to know who you are (serious or an idiot not worth their time), and, most importantly, why you want this information. That’s been my personal experience in researching history subjects. If you know someone, family or friend, who can vouch for you, and you drop their name in the right manner or have them call in advance, someone with knowledge might give you a bit of their time–or more likely put you onto the the best written and online sources of information. Ditto if you live in a town where everyone knows you. Some kind of personal connection would always be best with a question like this. With strangers I REALLY wanted to question, I would be prepared to produce a fistful (pun intended) of mystery-writer credentials-- published work or rejection slips–and references.
Finally, If you have any court history of criminal trouble, particularly in bad relationships, I’d find another gig or hire a professional researcher.
Sorry, missed your answer to my answer!
In the wet towel scenario I doubt that there would be anything visible at autopsy. The diagnosis would depend on the history given. A slightly heavier blow might leave light bruising but it would take an extremely thorough autopsy to detect. An even heavier blow would probably have a direct effect on the trachea and be obvious.