I’ve seen yet another movie where someone is killed by having a knife jammed into the top of their skull up to the hilt.
How reasonable is this scenario in real life? Is it something that can be done with normal human strength? Can the average knife do this and not break?
Just kidding about needing the answer fast, of course.
It happened at least once, some years ago in Jacksonville. The guy survived, and I think the perp only did a year or two. Whether the ‘average’ knife could do it is another question. This was a rather sturdy one.
Apparently, having a knife blade rammed through your skull is not only possible, but is also surprisingly survivable:
(the last one broke, if the op wants to exclude that)
And that’s just from the first page of a google search.
Sticking a knife into a skull is easy - if you hit the thinner parts of bone.
The Q was:
Human powered insertion
Top of skull - a very thick part.
Someone falling on a knife is not the same as being stabbed.
The stories I saw were a bit thin on how the knife got there, and one was through trivial, if any bone.
The first three are through the temple, where I believe the skull is thinner than the top. The last one looks like it came in from the bottom, perhaps not even hitting bone.
Just out of interest, was it:
Chronicles Of Riddick?
I actually have more than a bit of experience with roughly similar situations.
I’ve X-rayed/CT’d lots of patients (many of whom had the luxurious experience of a cramped helicopter flight) who had cranial-penetrating stuff that appeared to have met little resistance as related to energy of oject when it penetrated into cranial vault. A number of them were literally at vertex of skull (top). Somewhere in my closet, I have some films I copied of a typical kitchenfork that went inside-brain via a 8-9 yr old kid being mad at the patient, a late-teen ‘mature’ male. Skull thickness/density is pretty much at max by that age, fwiw.
The fork was in brain all the way to midway of handle of fork! Patient, though terrified at situation, was remarkably alert though terrified (maybe worsened because he had approx twenty Trauma/neuro-specialists shadowing him and discussing, in great detail, possible approaches to removal all the while I worked on him during the X-ray and CT stuff. Got a bit crowded at CT console as images came up and I adjusted contrast/brightness of artifact-ladled images and such, LOL, especially the 3-D recons I had set to be processed lastly.
I think he was more or less unchanged mentally since most of damage was to place(s) between the more important areas (quality-of-life speaking, that is) and Neuro follow-ups had me CT him a few weeks after surgery. Young man kept thanking me profusely (unncessarily, as I kept telling him!) for all the assurances I gave him at such a bad time, so he definitely remembers stuff well enough, and had no noticeable deficit of coordination/movement. Too bad there wasn’t a grand piano on hand to see if he had suddenly and unknowingly become a great pianist from the brain injuries 
The younger kid stabbed him overhanded, one-handed, while older bro was sitting on couch. IIRC, he jumped up just to be able to stab the top of head but not really enough to add energy to make any differece overall.
So…a sharp/strong/thin knife powered by a much, much, much stronger person, especially if stabber has a stance that allows transfer of max-energy downwards…yeah, it’ll go in, I bet. Especially if there’s a few inches for acceleration of knife (ie more energy). I’ve imaged plenty of butter knives embedded through craniums in various parts of it, often from pissed-off ex-wives or such who were tiny in comparison to strength of what movies like to show, heh.
Once the blade cracks/spreads the ‘entry wound’, much less energy is needed to keep knife propelled inwards, so to speak. And lots of energy can be transferred through the pointy (ie focussed energy area) portion of knife, By time the knife’s full width hits bone, there’s already a ‘cascadingingly broadening’ area of fractured skull that is much weaker already from being punctured innitially and has some ‘give’ to it (often with little bits/pieces of former skull part affected scattered around wound inside brain). If blade is fairly long and inserted all the way to hilt, it’d most likely have to exit through the hole at base of skull where spinal cord/medulla enter. Skull base is notably thicker, and it was necessary with CT to program into the ‘scan-plan’ more energy emitted (mAs/KV technically speaking) for adequate X-ray penetration of those portions of skull base/cerebellum area, fwiw.
Be much harder to use a knife that wasn’t pointy and sharp (enough), of course, IME. And sorry if I went TMI on this. Knife/screwdrivers/nails through top of skull - seen that a lot over the years, unfortunately.
Only on the dope could a semi-outlandish scenario be met with a “Yep, been there, seen that, have the Tshirt” within 24 hours.
Thanks Ionizer!
No, Mangetout, that wasn’t that one that I saw yesterday, but that was certainly one of the ones that generally inspired the question.
Doesn’t that happen in Game of Thrones like, once a week?