Free Republic

A fame-seeking teenager died attempting an alarming social-media challenge called “dusting,” according to her heartbroken parents. Renna O’Rourke, 19, of Arizona, passed away Sunday after trying the viral trend, also called “chroming,” in which netizens film themselves inhaling keyboard cleaning spray to get high for views online. “She always said, ‘I’m gonna be famous, Dad. Just you watch. I’m gonna be famous,’ and unfortunately, this is not under the most optimal of circumstances,” her grieving father, Aaron O’Rourke, told AZ Family. The Tempe teen went into cardiac arrest and was rushed to the hospital. She remained unconscious in the intensive...

A California Highway Patrol cruiser and a motorcycle collided on Interstate-280 on May 21, sending the rider flying into the center divider. The crash happened shortly after 8 a.m. on the southbound side of I-280 in the Menlo Park area, as the CHP officer was driving in a serpentine pattern to stop traffic ahead of an upcoming crash scene, CHP Sgt. Andrew Barclay told KRON4. Video of the crash shows the motorcyclist driving in-between lanes before entering the path of the winding CHP cruiser. “The officer was running a traffic break to stop traffic due to a rollover crash up...

A man was mauled to death and eaten by his pet lion just days after buying the beast to keep in his back garden. A resident of Najaf, southern Iraq, was horrifically attacked by the predator before it consumed most of his body on Thursday. 'Today in a garden in the city of Kufa in Najaf, a citizen was attacked by a lion in his own garden and died immediately,' Mufid Tahir, spokesperson for the Najaf Police, told local news site Rudaw. He added that because the lion had eaten a large portion of the man's body, and because the...

A climber airlifted with altitude sickness from near the peak of Japan's Mount Fuji last week returned to the slope and was rescued for a second time just four days later, authorities said Monday. The climber was identified only as a 27-year-old Chinese student living in Japan. He made an emergency call on April 22 and was airlifted after developing symptoms of altitude sickness, police said, adding that his climbing irons also were damaged.

A St. Louis woman was killed on Saturday night after she slid off the roof of a Cadillac Escalade while twerking and was run over by a St. Louis fire truck heading to an emergency. The woman, identified as Nyla Simmons, was killed at the intersection of South Compton and Chouteau around 11:30 PM. Nila slid off the roof when the Escalade turned left. She hit the cement and was then run over by the fire truck. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police released this statement on Sunday morning.

When 21-year-old Dallas LeBeau vowed to jump over a highway to win a contest and social media clout, his parents felt helpless to stop him. Now they’re left with regret.The night before he would try to ski jump over a busy three-lane highway in the Colorado high country, Dallas LeBeau sat down with his parents for dinner in their log cabin home. Valerie and Jason served grilled cheese and soup to their 21-year-old son, and as in the months before, the conversation quickly turned to the jump. Dallas announced that he was going to go for it the next day....

A tourist has been savagely attacked by a shark off a Caribbean beach, with reports that the victim lost both her hands as her husband tried to fight the beast off. The woman, believed to be a Canadian national, had been enjoying a holiday to the Turks and Caicos islands when the bloody attack happened last Friday. She was just a few yards from the shore when the predator struck, according to local media. The 55-year-old had been wading in the shallows as she 'attempted to engage' with the animal and take a picture of it, local authorities said. Witnesses...

A young man has passed away in agony after the price of his inhaler suddenly rose from $66 to $540. The pharmacist had informed him that his medication would now cost $539.19 - a shocking increase from his usual cost of $66.86.

An actress died during a bizarre spiritual cleansing ritual at a retreat in Mexico, when she took the venom of an Amazonian frog and suffered severe vomiting while being denied medical treatment, report said. Marcela Alcázar Rodríguez, 33, died on Dec. 1 after ingesting Kambo — a gluey, poisonous substance produced on the skin of the Amazon’s giant monkey frog — during a toxin cleansing ritual in Durango. Though Rodríguez suffered a sever reaction to the poison, she initially was denied medical attention by the retreat before finally being taken to a Red Cross hospital, where she died, witnesses said,...

A driver was struck and killed while getting out of his car to cross a Rhode Island highway where people were seen scrambling to pick up loose cash, according to reports. Kevin Elliot McCourt stopped his car on I-95 in Providence around 5:40 a.m. Wednesday and had already walked across the southbound lanes when he was fatally struck by a Volkswagen SUV on the northbound side, WJAR reported. The deadly accident came as civilians and cops were filmed chasing down dollar bills that were flying around on the same highway, NBC News said. However, police have not yet confirmed if...

A social media video depicting people “adopting” bears and raising them as pets is terrible idea, experts told Cowboy State Daily. They are just setting themselves up to be mauled, they said. A popular social media video that opens with a bear showing up at a family’s front door, set to a sappy love song with cute emojis littered throughout is put out there as a heartwarming tale of nature communing with humans. What the video really shows is a level of ignorance and interaction with one of the planet’s apex predators that’s really just incredibly stupid, wildlife experts told...

A California doctor has tragically died “suddenly” after suffering a stroke at just 32 years old. Dr. Maddie Giegold’s tragic sudden death came just five days before completing her residency. According to reports, the young doctor was “fully vaccinated” for Covid and received an mRNA “booster” shot shortly before she died. “I’ve never really met anyone else like her, she’s incredibly goofy,” said friend Hannah Trautner. Trautner said Giegold would do anything to make people laugh and inevitably become her friend. Those closest to Maddie say she loved cats, trail running, and sunflowers, and was described as being very active....

INDIANAPOLIS — a 29-year-old man was kiIIed following a road rage incident captured on a witness’s cell phone. The incident was deemed self-defense and the shooter was released without being arrəsted.

Video shows the teen displaying his handgun to the camera before pointing it at his head and pulling the trigger. On Thursday, 17-year-old Virginia-based rapper Rylo Huncho fatally shot himself while filming a TitTok video. In the video posted to his Instagram stories, Huncho was seen flipping the barrel of a handgun and holding it by the grip to show off the flashlight with a built-in laser sight. He then grabbed the grip, turned the gun towards his head, and said, "F**k Y'all N*****s" while pulling the trigger. In a GoFundMe set up by Hucho's cousin, she explained that "Suicide/accidental...

Over the last 30 years, 14 people, including three University of California, Santa Barbara, students, have fallen to their deaths from the same stretch of cliffs in Isla Vista, a neighborhood along the coast in Santa Barbara. Jacob Parker, a 23-year-old UCSB alumnus who graduated last spring, became the 14th victim to fall off the cliffs' edge while he was attending an afternoon party April 20 at one of the many houses that back up onto the bluffs. "He had so much potential. I was just looking forward to seeing what he would accomplish in life. This was just the...

The man who set himself on fire outside Trump's hush money trial in New York has reportedly died from his injuries. Max Azzarello, a 37-year-old from St. Augustine, Florida, reportedly died Friday night hours after the display, said to be 'an 'extreme act of protest...[against] a totalitarian con, and our own government' on the conspiracy theorist's own Substack. The reported revelation was offered to The New York Post late Monday, hours after he doused himself in accelerant outside the courthouse before going up in flames. Left in critical condition, Azzarello has since succumbed to those wounds, sources told the paper,...

Aaron Bushnell claimed he had secret knowledge of US troops fighting in Hamas tunnels under Gaza — just hours before setting himself on fire in an “extreme act of protest” against Israel, a close pal told The Post on Tuesday. The 25-year-old airman — who served in the Air Force’s 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing, but also interacted with radical anarchist groups online — ranted that he had “top-secret clearance’’ for military intelligence data in the call to his friend Saturday night, he said.

A member of the US Air Force was in critical condition after reportedly setting himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, Sunday afternoon. A video live streamed on Twitch appeared to show the Air Force member in uniform standing in front of the embassy gate and identifying himself as a member of the US Air Force, the New York Times and Washington Post said, citing officials who confirmed the footage matched the man in question. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide [in Gaza]. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest,” the...

40-year-old Michigan man who was known for his vigilante work that exposed child predators was shot to death on Friday night in Detroit. The Oakland County Sheriff's Office (OCSO) says that Robert Lee of Pontiac was at Universal Coney Island that night confronting a person he believed was a pedophile at a restaurant, WJBK reports. Lee often used social media to pose as underage girls in an effort to expose and catch pedophiles, according to the Detroit News. He went by the name “Boopac Shakur” on Facebook and has more than 11,000 followers on the platform. The man Lee accused...

A shocking video of tourists sprinting towards a bear at Yellowstone National Park has gone viral and prompted backlash on social media. The clip shows a mother black bear and her two cubs sniffing around in the grass, alongside a road full of queuing cars. Suddenly, a group of tourists jump out of their vehicles, point, and then begin to sprint towards the bears. There are four men running, one of whom appears to be carrying a toddler in his arms, while a woman comes into shot approaching the animals with a camera. Thankfully, the mama bear and her cubs...