There were no obvious signs of foul play “observed at or near the crime scene,” according to police.
Everything’s a crime, even if there’s no signs of foul play.
Heh. I “admired” thst turn pf phrase when I read the article too.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you send are policemen, everything looks like a crime.
I am not a forensic investigator, but I think there would be visible signs if the bodies were dragged outside.
Might depend on how much snow was on the ground and how much fell between when they bodies stopped moving and when they were found.
I’m calling it now… They were shot with special bullets made of dry ice.
Homebrewer here. Not a problem with making beer or wine. Even if the fermentation gets infected, it will make you throw up (not die).
When distilling (and I’m not a distiller so just regurgitating what distillers have told me), the head (first distilled portion) and tails (last distilled portion) have methyl. If you taste the head or the tails, then it is pretty much the same as finger nail polish remover. It is nasty on it’s own. Now if the lethal head or tails is mixed in with 50%+ alcohol distillate, you might think it was harsh and drink down a lethal amount.
Completely different from home brew or even wine, where the yeast usually stops fermenting around 12% or so. You can push it via various techniques up to maybe 20% like sake, but that’s about as high as you can go with yeast in some kind of sugar solution. Also, you can freeze distill (aka “apple jack”) which concentrates everything including the methyl, and could get to a lethal level. More likely, it’s more like double the starting alcohol amount and leads to wicked hangovers.
Or rotten potatoes, as the case may be.
If I make it to 90 years old, I figure that’s the time to try it. Along with wingsuit flying (but perhaps not at the same time).
The most suspicious unexplained thing is why the linked news report about the deaths does not include a photo of Taylor Swift, and does not state whether the 3 men were known to be Swifties.
The thing to understand is that distilling doesn’t create the methanol, the fermentation does. So when you make a batch of beer it has some amount of methanol in it, just at a low enough concentration that you don’t have to worry about it.
Now run that batch of beer through a still (or freeze distill) and keep everything that comes out: you still have the same amount of methanol (no more, no less), just now in a smaller amount of liquid. It’s easier to drink more of it, but you’ll get off flavors and the alcohol will still probably kill you first if you drink too much of it (but you may get a headache afterwards).
Or, run that batch of beer through a still and keep just the first and last bits that come out (heads and tails) and sell those to some unsuspecting drunk. Now you have a problem, because you’ve concentrated the methanol and made it easy to drink a bunch of it. That poor guy could die.
There can be another issue with home distillation: lead.
That is 100% an issue with it being illegal and people making jerry-rigged stills out of not-food-safe materials, not something inherent in the process.
Which is why I said it can be a problem.
Judging by this CDC page about lead poisoning, it could be relevant here (bolding mine):
Basic Decontamination
Victims who are able may assist with their own decontamination. Quickly remove and double-bag contaminated clothing and personal belongings.
Flush exposed skin and hair with copious amounts of water for at least 20 minutes. Wash with soap and rinse thoroughly with water. For minor skin contact, avoid spreading the material on unaffected skin (HSDB 2007). Use caution to avoid hypothermia when decontaminating victims, particularly children or the elderly. Use blankets or warmers after decontamination as needed.
So they were outside in the cold decontaminating themselves and forgot to use caution because they were drunk.
Just saying lead is another thing to watch for in their tox screens, given that enough of it causes encephalopathy and can induce coma.
I would assume they’d have to treat it like a crime scene until they were sure no crime was committed, or they were sure they were done collecting evidence from the site.
I’d certainly hope that was the case, anyway.
I understand that repeated exposure to lead is bad, in that it builds up in the body and the result is bad.
I don’t think that a one-time lead exposure is usually toxic (cue the funny comments about exposure to .32 calibre lead)
Oh, I agree. Far better for the LEOs to treat it like a crime scene until they’re sure it isn’t / wasn’t. Such as the disaster the initial responding officers made of the JonBenet Ramsey case.
I just found the wording of the newspaper article to be funny:
There were no obvious signs of foul play “observed at or near the crime scene,” according to police.
Once it’s not “foul play” it’s also not still a crime scene. Admittedly it was the police spokesperson who clouded the issue, but police spokesfolks are (in)famous for ponderous malapropisms. How about the newspaper writer notice that dumbness and write something smoother like:
According to police there were no obvious signs of foul play observed at or near where the bodies were found.
or
According to police there were no obvious signs of foul play observed at the scene of the tragedy.
They said there were no “obvious signs” of foul play, not that it wasn’t foul play. Just because the guys didn’t have bullet holes or smashed in skulls doesn’t rule out other, less obvious, types of foul play, like deliberate poisoning. And this whole thing is just so weird that I think it would be the heights of incompetence to not take the time to rule out such things. Sure, maybe it was all just a nearly inconceivable series of improbabilities, but that’s not the way to bet.
Sure, but it sounds like they’ve already made up their minds that a crime has been committed
They just haven’t found any evidence of a crime.
The Lou Dobbs Theory of investigation.