…All of my life, I have always heard that people who decide to end it all by jumping from a bridge or building or whatever were normally dead before they hit the groud, as a result of the brain realizing what it had done, and from the heart giving out in realization. Naturally, I scoffed at such a notion. But I have never seen anything one way or the other. Has there ever been an actual study done on this?
I don’t know of any studies, but a simple refutation of this theory is the fact that people survive suicidal falls. Half a dozen people have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived.
I dunno either, but it’d have to be a bitch to change your mind about it on the way down. 'Course, if you think about it, the fall would probably be a lot of fun! That sudden stop at the end would be another matter.
It’s probably a UL, but I have heard several times about a coroner who assigned “excessive deceleration” as the cause of death on a jumper’s death certificate.
I also heard about a guy who jumped off a 50-story building and as he passed the open 20th-story windows, the people inside heard him say, “so far, so good…” Yeah, OK, it’s a groaner…
Don’t need to do a study. If people were “dead before they hit the ground” both skydivers and bungee jumpers would be a vanishing breed.
Oh, I’m sure some folks croak before the sudden stop at the end - a weak heart, maybe - but the vast majority are probably alive and concious up until the end.
Nope, I think that’s a probable thing. It is “excessive deceleration” that kills. There have been a few instances of folks surviving extreme falls without things like parachutes (one instance from WWII was many thousand feet) and in every case their fall was broken by something that brought them to a halt more slowly than simply whomping into the turf. Trees, deep snow, whatever… In other words - it’s not that fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Stop less suddenly and you might survive.
Yeah, Broomstick! You said:
There have been a few instances of folks surviving extreme falls without things like parachutes (one instance from WWII was many thousand feet) and in every case their fall was broken by something that brought them to a halt more slowly than simply whomping into the turf. Trees, deep snow, whatever… In other words - it’s not that fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end. Stop less suddenly and you might survive.
I recall reading about a guy serving as a tailgunner in a B-24 during WWII. {IIRC, the article I saw was in Reader’s Digest, a great many years ago.) His plane had been hit by AA fire and was burning, and the pilot had ordered the crew to bail out, but the guy left his post, sans parachute, to assist a wounded waist-gunner. After said waist-gunner was out the door, he headed back to his station to collect his own 'chute, only to find it on fire and useless. The plane broke in half, and he found himself on a one-way ride toward the home planet, without the benefit of the parts of the airplane that keep it in the sky. He chose to just bail out of the severed tail section, without a 'chute. He landed in a dense grove of pine trees, bouncing back and forth from tree to tree, and settled in a feet-deep snow drift, where he was discovered the next day by the Germans. The enemy officers disbelieved his implausible story, and held him as a spy. (He had not broken a bone, though he was plastered with various abrasions, lacerations and contusions, and had a badly twisted spine.) Eventually, again IIRC, the Germans were able to verify his story, and he was returned to the British Isles in a prisoner exchange. Weird shit, eh?
OOPS! I forgot to mention that my memory sez he left what was left of the plane at around 18,000 feet altitude. What with air drag, terminal velocity would have been reached in hundreds, rather than thousands, of feet, but WOW! What a ride!
Sounds like something the coroner/medical examiner or whoever just tells the family for piece of mind.
Remember the planes collideing over NYC in, I believe, the mid 50s? I vividly remember a picture in the paper of a kid who landed in a SNOW BANK and survived the fall.
I’ve always wondered what people like him do with the REST OF THEIR LIVES? Ditto the three WWII sailors that the three chaplins gave their life jackets to after their ship was torpedoed.
I jumped off the highest Olympic diving board at a swimming pool last year. I can’t dive; I just jumped. Heaps of teenagers line up to do it so I just joined them. I’ll never forget the odd sensation I had that came out of the fact that I thought I would hit the water much sooner than I did. It was a feeling of having time to spare - a gift of time - but a useless gift because I couldn’t use it in any way - I was just falling. I think suicide jumpers must experience that too.
IIRC, in the movie “Running Scared”, Danny Costanzo (Billy Crystal) is near a body of a criminal that fell from a rooftop. Asked how the criminal died, he says, “Decelleration Trauma.” :D:D
There was a case not all that long ago (ten years?) where a skydiver whose parachute failed to open splatted into marshy ground and survived with relatively minor injuries, IIRC (a broken rib, something like that).
…Confirm my suspicion, but I’m wondering if the fact that these people that fell, skydivers, etc., weren’t actually going out with the intention of killing themselves was a factor. Will to live plays a big part, I would think. But taking the example of the people who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, THAT’S the sort of thing I was looking for. But I wonder if that’s the rule, or the exception to it.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this scenario. The cause of death was listed as “multiple blunt force trauma”, not “heart failure” or “sudden deceleration”. And I think any coroner who listed sudden deceleration as a cause of death, thinking it was cute, would be out of work in an extreme hurry.
Bergen Evans (a Proto-Cecil if ever there was one) addresses this at length in his book The Spoor of Spooks. Also check out his Natural History of Nonsense
Suffice to say, there’s no truth to the notion that you can be killed in some mysterious way “by the speed of your fall”. Evans suspects that this myth/lie was used to comfort relatives of the unfortunate.
I thought I’d heard about parachute jumpers who lived after falling what one would have thought a fatal distance, but I have no cites.
I seem to recall a story of a Russian stewardess getting sucked out of an airliner at 30000FT+ and surviving. Something about her landing on the slope of a snow covered hill. She did break some bones though but made a full recovery.
I recently saw a special where a woman was skydiving and her chute didn’t open. However, she managed to fall in a muddy field and, although badly hurt, survived the ordeal.
Oh, wait…that was Peggy Hill.
Having grown up in the SF Bay Area, I know more than I want to about jumpers. Sometimes they DO survive, but not very damn often. I never heard of any suicide dying of anything other than major internal injuries or drowning. Of course, suicide isn’t something they advertise.
I dated a guy who owned a skydiving school. He has seen couple accidents in the 20+ years he jumped. He says that you could tell that people had kept trying to open the malfunctioning chutes by the scratches and claw marks and the damage to their fingers.
Yeah, that still is the World Record for highest survived fall (sans parachute). I doubt people are looking to break that one any time soon.
Terminal velocity is achieved rather quickly - it’s only 120 mph for the human body. Doesn’t require thousands of feet. Probably doesn’t require even a hundred.
There is a variety of skydiving that allows a person to achieve speeds higher than 120 mph in free-fall - but it’s done by people who know what they’re doing, how to position themselves for minimal drag, etc. Far different than the inexperienced flopping-around suicide or accident victim.
You can die from “blunt force” in a fall, but there are also injuries that are due to decelleration and not “blunt force”. A member of a pilot’s e-mail list I’m on stalled and spun in his plane while on final approach several years ago - basically slammed into the ground at several hundred miles an hour. Amazingly, he did survive (although with some permanent injuries) The worst injuries were not from broken bones (of which he had many) but from the sudden decceleration forces ripping loose blood vessels and organs from their internal moorings. Including ripping one of the branches of the aorta - the same sort of injury that killed Princess Diana.
So, I suppose it could be a toss up whether it was getting hit by a planet that killed you, or the sudden stop of various body parts at slightly different microseconds resulting in internal ripping and shredding. I don’t think listing “decelleration trauma” is necessarily “cute” - it could be accurate.
IIRC, the only person who has survived jumping/falling from the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a worker who fell during its construction. His toolbox fell with him. The box hit the water a split second before he did, and it broke the surface tension of the water for him. I’m not sure what injuries he received, but I know he did survive.