Not even Law and Order would attempt to capture this mess...This is an unbelievable twist of fate!!!


At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS President Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story:


On March 23, 1994 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide.

He left a note to the effect indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through window, which killed him instantly.

Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.

"Ordinarily," Dr Mills continued, "Someone who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended, is still defined as committing suicide." That Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death, but probably would not have been successful because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands. The room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with a shotgun. The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Mr. Opus.

When one intends to kill subject "A" but kills subject "B" in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject "B."

When confronted with the murder charge the old man and his wife were both adamant and both said that they thought the shotgun was not loaded.

The old man said it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her.

Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, assuming the gun had been accidentally loaded.

The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident.

It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.

Since the loader of the gun was aware of this, he was guilty of the murder even though he didn't actually pull the trigger. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.



Now comes the exquisite twist.


Further investigation revealed that the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus.

He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window. The son had actually murdered himself so the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.

A true story from Associated Press, (Reported by Kurt Westervelt)

My thots on wat's written below...got it off somewhere...seemingly true but i would rather call this piece of writing an expression of a women's anger...hahahaha...She wrote it due to Govt's call to have more babies...haha...

well, Here's my chauvanistic take on it...This is a statement: Women want everything, from careers to money to good looks...well, it's abt time they learn a thing or two abt "NAtional service", afterall, we guys did a 28 mths service and 15-cycle ICTs. And we regularly get complaints like "wat did they do to deserve higher pay than us" "All they did in army was to run around and play mc"....hahaha...these comments regularly get me up. Well alll ic an say is they NEVER saw this coming...hahahaha...hmmm...wat if someday they make it a law to pro-create in singapore for all married couples....

food for thot eh...

something quite off-track.....they showing that darn william hung on CH5 again this friday...i wonder if they are exploiting his bad voice(quite common trait) or guts (seemingly tonnes of it)....i really dun like this guy, and the way he carries himself turns me off big time sia...

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Do not know if you follow up on recent issues on precreation. Today (10th March 2004) I was reading the speech by Dr Ong Seh Hong (Aljunied GRC) who said that its the "duty of citizen to procreate", it really irked me into thinking the mess these people up there is causing! They're trying to emotionally blackmail and exhaust its citizens.

No system is perfect, thus, if they want a competitive economic system, the family do somehow have to take a back seat. Deep seated traditional asian-style family building need loads of personal time and commitment (do we abhore or adhere western fast-food style of family building?). Somehow, one have to give way. If only we can run a family like a corporation and take the womb as a baby churning factory (are we paid sufficiently for operating the factory anyway? Hey! Didn't they incalcate us to be "economic"? Its a better word than "calculative" huh?) then, will we be able to build up the family forces indefinitely. However, those people up there sometimes contradict each other by saying that we gotto seperate the economic aspect from family rearing which is very very much impossible in Singapore. We are incalcated to be economic about life itself, our worthiness is written in our education background, our qualification, house we live, car we drive and type of jobs we hold!!

They perpetuate the idea of such economic worthiness by pushing marriage among graduates, give incentives to the employed mothers-to-be thus leaving out incentives for the lowly educated and the low income from having more children (have more only if you can afford it). If you're sick, the wards and treatment you get (MO or consultant) is dependent on your income. The Singapore shares+other household incentives/subsidise that you get is dependent on your income as well. (Thou these are positive incentives for the low income, it inevitably is a double edged sword which emphasises the value of wealth and its importance in Singapore). It actually run a full circle. We're living in a world not much different from old India's discrimination based on social class as well... Just that ours is a re-packaged caste system.

If they do make it compulsory to make babies, we do indeed are becoming just a factory churning out what is required from us. Look at the educational system, they are conditioned to churn out students for specific industrial sector by forecast of demands and needs and now, we humans, are just mere digits of their forecast in anticipation of declining population?