I have found that Indica-heavy strains do weird things to my metabolism, making me feel cold even when I should not. But that is just me, I guess. There is also the “couch-lock” effect, which makes the user profoundly sedentary – but it takes a pretty major dose to bring that on.
This will be interesting to follow up. But I think the circumstances of the deaths will prove to be far more mundane than the circumstances of the homeowner’s following behaviors.
Some people are either profoundly stupid, profoundly addled, or profoundly involved in illegal activities. The homeowner is one of those poeple.
Heroin is one helluva drug. I’ve purposely avoided it, despite trying pretty much every other drug I’ve encountered.
I recall someone describing to me his first encounter with cocaine when he was about 30. At that time he had some experience with some drugs, but was no great connoisseur. He was telling me the tale years later. It went about like this:
The actual experience of the high was kinda weird and not so great. But the instant I was feeling normal again, I totally wanted to do it again. Took everything I had not to snort another line right then.
It was then I realized the power. I’d either go totally down that addiction spiral to disaster or I’d never try cocaine again. There was no middle way.
Needless to say, he chose “never again.” A wise man knows his limitations in the face of great power.
A long time ago I read what somebody wrote: “When I took a hit of coke, I felt like a new man. The first thing the new man wanted was another hit.”
I’m also suspicious-ish that they just dozed off and froze. One guy? Sure, I can maybe see that. But three?
A possibility which occurs to me is carbon monoxide poisoning. But then how to explain the homeowner surviving?
Yeah the temps are in the single digits where I’m at and I’m going outside to smoke and there’s no relaxing in this weather. When I first read the news I thought the same - go outside for a smoke, sit down, pass out, never wake up. But thinking about how it’s actually working for me - no, you don’t really sit down in this weather. You stand with one hand in your pocket, step back and forth to keep warm, suck the hell out of your cigarette, and get back inside.
Three healthy sober sensible people don’t freeze to death in a backyard of a house occupied by other healthy sober sensible people even in those temps.
Clearly some part of healthy, sober, & sensible is was missing from somebody(ies).
I’m 99% certain the toxicology report will come back with some kind of drug in their system that will explain this.
My question would be, did they take that drug intentionally? Is it possible they ingested something without knowing it, and as a result, weren’t aware of the danger of maybe passing out in the backyard? Basically, “Drink adulterated beer, → go for a smoke → Don’t realize they’re passing out because of the roofies or whatever → freeze to death”.
If they didn’t realize they had taken something, then there’s a good chance that they didn’t recognize what was happening until it was too late. “Hey, Joe, what’s wrong with Bob? Joe? Joe? Oh, man, something’s wrong with Joe toooo…snore…”
Folks who are thoroughly wasted, even on old fashioned alcohol, are famously self-absorbed and unobservant. AFAIK we have no reason to believe they all went out as a group or were interacting. Per the OP’s cite the three bodies were found in different parts of the yard.
I could imagine Adam goes out to smoke or whatever & collapses. Bob & Carl go out later, assuming Adam had come back inside and was elsewhere in the house. Meanwhile Adam’s body is unnoticed being already lightly covered with fast-falling snow. etc.
Or whatever. There are lots of ways this might have happened. And unlike on CSI, no great effort will be expended figuring out the details, nor sharing those details with the audience.
For this to happen three times, on just booze alone, is incredibly unlikely. I’ve been drunk in the cold, with other drunk people, many times, and yet we’ve never been so drunk we missed one of them passing out and dying from the cold, let alone three of them at once.
Hell, there was one time I had to stop my truck in the middle of the road to get a drunk guy who was lying in the middle of the road off the road, and even his two drunk-ass “friends” realized he was drunk and passing out. They apparently just didn’t care. But even then, no one died.
This had to be something that hits a lot faster and harder than booze.
Like a manure pit chain death. First guy goes in, asphyxiates in the methane. Second guy jumps in to save the first guy, he goes down too. Third guy jumps in to save the first two guys…
Or, as I said, they did not go out there simultaneously and each collapsed separately.
In my more youthful years I’ve certainly done the maneuver where as I get drunker I speed up my drinking and of harder stuff such that suddenly I’m really stupid, bordering on blind, and still have 3 just slammed but not yet absorbed shots in my belly. Collapse to unconsciousness is then inevitable and imminent. A shot challenge late at night after hours of moderate to heavy drinking is a great way to drive several people into that same scenario more or less simultaneously.
In general I agree the most likely outcome is everyone, even the host, was blotto on something illegally potent that wiped them all out to stupor / unconsciousness pretty quickly.
The difference was the host slept it off indoors where it’s warm. And maybe spent 36 hours doing it. The others were not so lucky.
I see a case of illegal drug use and maybe criminal negligence. Probably not homicide under any rational sense of the common law.
But for that to happen three times? Highly unlikely. They guys had friends and family who still cared about them enough to go looking for them. If they were all the sort to get blackout drunk hard enough or often enough to beat the odds like this, would they all still have enough F&F to do this? Wouldn’t at least one of those F&F members have said, “Oh yeah, no surprise Bob passed out drunk”?
Even drinking hard alcohol straight, it takes some work to get that drunk, and everyone gets that drunk at different rates. Compare that to a dose of Fentanyl, or something, in which it’s far easier to take too much, in a single dose.
Their first problem was that they went to the guy’s house on Sunday to watch the Chiefs game.
The Chiefs played Saturday night.
FTR the deaths happened on or around Sun, Jan 7 when the Chiefs played the Chargers.
More recent article:
That clarifies it a bit, but the weather wasn’t extremely cold that day. Looking online, I found that the high in KC on Sunday the 7th was 37, and the low was 32. Monday it was 34 and 32, and Tuesday it was 32 and 25. Certainly cold enough to perish from exposure, but not necessarily a ‘quick’ death from freezing.
The friends overdosed inside the house, remaining guy (who I am certain was also on something) dragged them outside either to “wake them up” or to claim “they died of freezing!”
This will 100% be drug related. (And no, not pot! 
)
That happened to my uncle. Chemical storage container in the process of being cleaned but still contained enough not-oxygen to kill the cleaner and my uncle, the would-be rescuer.