Matthew Johnson and his three friends took a nice canoe trip down the Mad River in Ohio. When they came to the train trestle, like all dumb college-age boys will do, they decided to jump off the bridge back into the river. (Since I'm blogging on this, you probably know what comes next.) When the train came speeding down the tracks, as trains are want to do, his three friends jumped into the safety of the river but not Matthew. He got scared to jump and like an idiot, tried to outrun the train.
As you might predict, he was struck and killed by the train. The stupider part of this story is that his moron of a mother is suing the canoe rental company on the grounds that they should have known and prevented the boys from climbing onto the trestle. And she's suing the train company for not stopping in time to not run over her chicken-$#!* kid who was too afraid to jump already.
To me this is right up there with the McDonald's coffee law suit in it's level of inanity. When you hurt or kill yourself by being too retarded to hold a cup of hot coffee or too dumb to not climb into the path of a speeding train, you deserve exactly what you got and nobody is responsible for compensating you for it.
What kind of idiot lawyer would take this case anyway?
3 comments:
Sorry, Ed, but remembering my own self at that time of life, I can only view this as a horrible tragedy. The young man did not "deserve" this. If he did, many, many of us would have joined him in the grave decades ago. The mother's suits are a stupid product of our litigeous society, and should indeed "fail."
I have to disagree. While young men intentionally putting themselves in mortal danger just for the thrill of it is a longstanding tradition, to not think it through and then to refuse to take the obvious route of egress that your friends easily took, is idiotic to the point of kind of getting what you asked for.
Panic killed this man.
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