This actor died when wadding from a blank .44-caliber load went into his skull. The question is: was this an accident, or was it his stupidity?
When it first happened, it was said he jokingly put the gun to his head and fired, not knowing the wadding would shoot out of the barrel and be dangerous. But now, every report of the event says it was an accident, not saying anything about it being self-inflicted joke.
Anyone know the straight dope?
I see you’ve been in the “TV suicide” thread…
I checked out MEBuckner’s link and read that about J-E H’s “accident”. I wondered the same thing. Like you, I had heard at the time that he put the gun to his head and said something like, “I’ve ‘killed’ a lot of people on this show; this is for them.” If this is true, he should have been nominated for a (non-existent) Darwin Award. Mebbe a News Of The Weird “Thinning the Herd” honorable mention.
If I recall correctly, the reports at the time sad that he did put the gun to his own head and fire.
I remember the incident. Hexum pointed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger as a joke, apparently thinking that the blank in the gun wouldn’t harm him. I imagine that it was ruled an accidental suicide.
My GOD he was dreamy.
I wept like an infant when he died. I mean, a twelve year old hormonal gal with pin ups all over my room…
Every time I hear Hard Habit To Break by Chicago, for some reason, I think of my love of Jon Erik Hexum.
sigh
jarbaby
I would think you would be compelled so by Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need a Hero”. 
Yes. You would.
But interestingling Holding Out For A Hero makes me think of Maxwell Caulfield of Grease II fame.
Verily, my ways are mysterious.
jarbaby
I think it was referred to as an accident because it sure wasn’t a suicide, and couldn’t really be called a homocide.
The problem was this- people did (and still do) believe that a “blank” bullet can’t hurt you. They think of a “blank” as like a cap gun- all sound, no projectile.
Wrong. Just ask Jon-Erik. Paper wadding traveling at a high rate of speed will penetrate tissue or even bone. Perhaps the wadding isn’t expelled with every shot, but the possibility is certainly there. Anyone who plays with a gun, prop or real, is a moron. This was an accident, but one of the “incredibly stupid” variety.
Darwin Award, indeed.
I’d heard he was playing Russian Roulette with the female star of the show he was in (I can’t remember it’s name, but no doubt someone will oblige) and shot himself with the blank.
Clearly an accident, as opposed to suicide, as he did not realise that the wadding would come out of the barrel with sufficient force to inflict a fatal wound.
But, why do they even have to put blanks or wads of paper or anything in a pretend gun? Can’t they just dub in the gunshot sounds later? I have never understood that.
Didn’t a similar incident also kill Brandon Lee…something to do with blanks being shot at close range.
Brandon Lee’s death was similar, but a bit more of a freakish accident than was Hexum’s. A prop pistol was loaded with dummy rounds for one scene and they were replaced with blanks for the next (in a revolver, blanks look different when seen through the front openings of the cylinder). Part of one of the dummy bullets lodged in the cylinder and was propelled by the blank cartridge into Lee’s body. It was a foreseeable accident, but not nearly as much so as Jon-Erik Hexum’s irresponsible handling of a firearm.
HelloKitty: Without a blank, you don’t get that telltale puff of smoke. And besides, most gunshots are, in fact, dubbed after the fact anyway. If you’ve ever fired an actual handgun, or seen someone do it, you know they don’t sound like the hand-carried bazookas they apparently have in movies.
AWB, what does accident mean to you? According to Merriam Webster definition 2 a, there is no reason that something can’t be both an accident and stupidity.
In fact, I can’t think of a death caused by ignorance that isn’t an accident.
I’d like to point out that Hexum was far from stupid. In fact, if I recall correctly he had a Master’s degree in either Mechanical or Chemical engineering, and was working as an engineer when he got his big break.
Stuff happens. Some people don’t realize that blanks are dangerous. In fact, Hexum’s accident was the incident that initially raised awareness in Hollywood and with the public that blanks could in fact be lethal.
I knew this years before. A boyfriend of my mother’s brought over a Colt .45 (Peacemaker revolver, not a Government Model), and shot a couple of blanks off. I asked if I could shoot it (I was 12 or so), and got the obligatory lecture on gun safety. The lecture culminated in his showing me the dangers of blanks by putting the muzzle about 6" away from a piece of 1/4" plywood and firing. The ‘blank’ blew a pretty convincing hole through the plywood.
Well, I guess by that definition, his death was an accident. But the reports that said it was an accident without mentioning that he pointed the gun at himself make it sound as though the gun went off somehow else and the barrel was unfortunately pointed at him.
IIRC, they were in the middle of the umpty-umpth take of a supposedly easy scene, and he got disgusted, laid back on the bed, and “shot” himself in the head as a joke.
And Jon-Erik Pretty-Boy was a model before he got his “big break.” I’m sorry, but I can’t believe the Master’s degree thing without some kind of verification.
Perhaps I’ll ask my favorite chemical-engineer-in-training what she thinks… hmmm…
I have fired a few guns, Cerviace, and they did sound like hand-carried bazookas. The .44 mag, .357 and even the .38 special come to mind, the very ones you might see on TV or in the movies. What wadding gives you is the noise (think fire crackers)or re-coil; not smoke. You will get smoke without wadding. Further, the (movie)shot almost always cuts away after the gun goes off anyway. Hollywood has plenty of way to get the barrel of a gun to smoke afterwards. Dry ice or digital. And most guns I have shot don’t have smoking barrels anyway, this is a carry over from westerns when they used a different type of powder.
I was skeptical, too. According to a couple of fan sites, JEH graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. in Social Science.
Although I’m still wondering why being a good looking model means you can’t be smart or indeed, in posession of a Masters Degree.
jarbaby
And yet, we’ve no evidence to the contrary…
…A BA in Social Science is a FAR cry from a Master’s in ANY kind of engineering.