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The 1999 nominees are:
NOMINEE No. 1: [San Jose Mercury News]: An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girlfriend's windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut.
NOMINEE No. 2: [Kalamazoo
Gazette] James Burns, 34, (a mechanic) of Alamo, Mich., was killed in March
as he was trying to repair what police describe as a "farm type truck."
Burns got a friend to drive
the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so
that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns' clothes
caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns "wrapped in
the
drive shaft."
NOMINEE No. 3: [Hickory Daily Record] Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, N.C. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for his Smith & Wesson .38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.
NOMINEE No. 4: [UPI, Toronto]
Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown
Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged
24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into
the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as
he was explaining the strength of the building's windows to visiting law
students. Hoy previously has conducted the demonstration of window strength
according to police
reports. Peter Lawyers, managing partner of the firm
Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was one of the
best and brightest" members of the 200-man association.
NOMINEE No. 5: ["The News of the Weird"] Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina's electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. Whilst sitting on a metal toilet in his cell and attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.
NOMINEE NO. 6: ["The Indianapolis
Star"]. A cigarette lighter may have triggered fatal explosion in Dunkirk,
Indiana. A Jay County man using a cigarette lighter to check the barrel
of a muzzle loader was
killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his
face, sheriff's investigators said. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his
parents' rural Dunkirk home about 11:30 p.m. Investigators said Pryor was
cleaning
a 54-caliber muzzle loader that had not been firing properly.
He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gunpowder ignited.
NOMINEE No. 7: [Reuters,
Mississauga, Ontario] A man cleaning a bird feeder on the balcony of his
condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories
to his death. Stefan Macko, 55,
was standing on a wheeled chair when the accident occurred,
said Inspector D'Arcy Honer of the Peel regional police. "It appears the
chair moved and he went over the balcony," Honer said.
