Posted on 08/12/2014 12:07:47 PM PDT by servo1969
Lt. Boyd said Williams was found in his bedroom “clothed, in a seated position, unresponsive with a belt secured around his neck.”
There were also several cuts on his left wrist and a pocket knife with a dried red substance was found in the vicinity, he stated.
The Academy-Award winner was 63.
“The work of the coroner’s office is not complete at this time,” Lt. Boyd stressed. He said a final cause of death would be released in several weeks after toxicology tests are completed.
“The forensic examination conducted by Dr. Joseph Cohen did not [indicate]…that Mr. Williams had been in a struggle prior to him being diseased,” he added.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Your daughter sounds like my 11year old. Very intelligent and it absolutely boggles our minds and those of her behavioral psychologist and her psychiatrist. Knows right from wrong but chooses the wrong path 99% of the time and seems to revel in her madness. At her age they won’t diagnose her with schizophrenia or bi polar disorder but exhibits symptoms of both. We tried every form/way of trying to correct her behavior but nothing works. She is only happy when she is doing whatever she pleases regardless of any of societies rules! This past 2 months she has decided to steal/shoplift every chance she gets to the point where she does not go shopping with us.
She is the most disruptive / destructive person one can imagine and now her shrink and counselors are spending most of her sessions just trying to help us cope and preparing us for the fact that she is unlikely to change and may get worse.
“I’m going to disagree with you because everything you just mentioned had an escape clause built into it. They weren’t really risking anything.”
Well, we can offer dozens of other examples, because humans override these instincts everyday. Flying on planes, riding a bicycle, driving an automobile, going to war, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, fasting, standing on a high balcony, playing with fire, etc, etc. All of them involve overriding our survival instincts, and not all of them are without consequence.
In fact, it’s such a common thing that parents teach their children how to do it, and when someone has trouble overriding those instincts in some circumstance, rather than call them “normal”, we say they have a “phobia” and call them “abnormal”. This is accurate as far as humans go, because being able to override these instincts on a whim is actually normal human behavior.
“We had a drowning in the bathtub murder trial around here not too long ago, and the prosecutor’s point was that even when unconscious a body’s reaction would be to flail out of that water.”
The prosecutor was slightly mistaken. There is an instinct, not a reflex, to flail your arms when you are near drowning, in order to push your head above water enough to take a breath. However, instincts don’t matter when you are unconscious, only reflexes can act at that point, because instincts are part of the higher nervous system, while reflexes are not. Once a person is unconscious, there is no opportunity for an instinct to do anything.
Besides, even if what you mentioned was a reflex, reflexes are specific to the stimuli which cause them. You can’t assume, because a reflex exists in response to one stimuli, that there would be a similar reflex in response to completely different stimuli. So, the human response to drowning has little to do with the human response to asphyxiation, since the stimuli are different.
Here are the observed human responses to asphyxiation:
* rapid loss of consciousness (at 8-18 seconds),
* convulsions (at 10-19 seconds),
* decerebrate and decorticate rigidity,
* loss of muscle tone (between 1 min 38 seconds and 2 mins 15 seconds),
* isolated body movements ‘from time to time’ (last between 1 min 2 seconds and 7 mins 31 seconds),
* deep rhythmic abdominal respiratory movements (last between 1 min 2 seconds and 2 mins 5 seconds).
http://www.forensicmed.co.uk/pathology/pressure-to-the-neck/
None of those actions seem deliberate enough to save you if your body weight is working against you. Perhaps a convulsion could dislodge you by random chance, but that would be unpredictable.
The prosecutor won.
Again, all of your examples are of tested behaviors that have such a high correlation with safe indulgence that there is no sense of gesturing to kill oneself.
People would think me a nut if I said, “If you don’t give me love, then I’ll fly on an airplane.”
But, if I saw a bit on my wrists or wrap a belt around my throat, then those are known suicidal methods. One can reasonable use them to telegraph despair without necessarily meaning to kill oneself. The danger of a gesture is that one accidentally be successful.
So, I repeat. Slumping down with a belt around one’s neck requires great determination to follow through with an actual asphyxiation. It’s contrary to self-preservation and good sense.
So, it is UNUSUAL. It is easy to imagine a gesture gone bad OR a great determination to kill oneself. The sawed on wrist with a dull blade suggests a real possibility of a gesture gone bad. The ability to stand suggests a gesture gone bad.
So, if they end up telling the family this might have been a gesture gone bad, then I won’t be the least bit surprised.
These artists never go in style.
And, how does one strangle oneself found sitting in a chair with a belt looped around his neck somehow attached to a door?
I'm just not understanding the scene at all.
Very sad for his family and close friends.
Why the hate, Lazamataz?
Sounds like you have found a way to help your daughter. God bless.
I agree that once the oxygen is cut off the person’s reflex is to get air, and so most suicides are done in a way to prevent that, and this wasn’t.
A second thought on the wrists....cutters are those who do tattoos and have cut themselves before, and have serious issues inside like a bad childhood or molested etc. Not everyone is open to cutting their wrists and watch the blood drain out....while dying. Maybe a desperate drug dealer who is about to be arrested....I don’t know, it makes no sense he would close the knife and find a table to put it on after cutting his wrists, unless he is a clean freak, but then what clean freak cuts their wrists?
“The prosecutor won.”
That doesn’t mean he was correct, now does it? It just means his argument convinced 12 people.
“Again, all of your examples are of tested behaviors that have such a high correlation with safe indulgence that there is no sense of gesturing to kill oneself.”
Yes, there is an exact correlation. The mechanism you use to override the instinct in those cases is exactly the same one you would use when you commit suicide: the force of will. If you can do one, you can do the other just as easily. The difference is a matter of conscious recognition of a greater danger, not increased difficulty of overriding the same instinct with the same mechanism. Once you have made the conscious decision to commit suicide, that difference is not going to be a factor.
Either he knew Jesus as his own personal savior or didn’t... ______________ Chickensoup
Have no idea of what the man believed. Do hope and believe that God is a compassionate and loving father who knows the suffering of the broken. Never will I try to guess the mind of God but instead be his humble servant.
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Well spoken and very comforting.
I hadn’t heard that the knife had been closed and placed on a table. An additional indication of a gesture gone bad.
And the most important indication of a gesture gone bad....alcohol. I’d forgotten that Williams’ drug of choice had switched to alcohol. We had more alcohol connected gestures and suicides in the Army than any other indicator. Why the connection with alcohol? Because it dulls their reaction mentally and physically. If we get an autopsy report indication alcohol, then put another mark in the column headed ‘possible gesture’.
I counseled this for years, taught it from installation to installation, was responsible for the counseling in most of north central Germany for the US Army, and visited in hospitals and homes with those who’d been involved in ideation, gesture, and attempts.
The line between a gesture and an attempt can be pretty thin.
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Shingles? It lives in us all, I think, as long as we have had chickenpox. Then something provokes the shingles.
Had shingles twice and it is painful. A friend of mine had shingles in her eyes - I don't even know how that is possible.
At any rate, she was in great pain, almost lost her vision and was hospitalized for some time just to control the pain.
Great pain can lead to catastrophic decisions. Not saying this is what happened here - just chiming in for the Herpes Simplex crowd, of which I am a member! It feels like endless pain.
Well he wasn’t drinking anymore and his planning to enter rehab was so he wouldn’t go back, now that’s not saying he wasn’t drinking....we will have to wait for the toxicology report to find out. So we shall see as you said....if he wasn’t then I think there was something else going on the night before when his wife last saw him at 10 pm.
That could have caused a reaction on his part. Maybe there will be something new soon. A lot of people missed the ‘ closed blade’ pocket knife on a table near Williams comment from Officer Boyd at the Conference but I didn’t, then he said they found dried blood on it and are waiting to see if it is Williams....
Bipolar is the current politically correct term for manic depressive. In thinking about Mr. Williams, I suspect that a lot of his over the top acting (funny and brilliant though it was) was in the manic phase of his bipolar swings.
I know how you feel and I used to feel the same way, too. Now, I think that suffering’s a big blessing. It can keep your heart and mind focused on Jesus, as well as teach valuable lessons on enduring and overcoming despite it all.
I am certain this guys parents felt the same way, but then the inspiration wouldn’t have been a gift to the rest of us.
Oh yes, I know God uses our circumstances for the greater good. People will ask why do bad things happen to good people? I think it’s because God is molding us to be used for his purpose. If every Christian was perfect and had a perfect life, how would those people reach those that are suffering, in pain, emotionally wounded? I think he puts us through our paces so that we can indeed find common ground, so we can relate, and so we can show true empathy.
I just pray and pray that I am able to be the strong leader my wife and kids need.
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