“The legal basis for this lawsuit is perfectly cromulent, your honor!”
Vega, 24, competed in September 2005 to win a Nissan pickup, the prize going to the contestant who endured standing beside the truck with a hand on it longer than any other. After standing for 48 hours, he walked away, broke into a Kmart across the street and, with a shotgun taken from the store, shot himself in the head.
In their petition, his family alleged that the stress of the contest caused Vega “to become “temporarily insane and to take his own life” and Patterson was negligent in not providing psychiatric or medical monitoring to contestants
I would guess that he was already insane from being named ‘Vega’.
Some “douche lawyer” will take the case and there will be some type of settlement.
Maybe he realized he had wasted 48 hours of his life for a NISSAN.
Damn, guns DO kill people. I stand corrected.
Best. Story. Ever.
Makes sense to me.
Too bad stupid always hurts the WRONG PEOPLE!
#4, mark, maybe tiny trucks and K-Mart kill people, ya’ never know. Maybe he got that gun in the kid’s gun section next to the wine rack.
[off topic] Thanks to you and Alix for the Sennheiser tip, phones sound great, better than AKG electrostatics. Now all I need is the bucks.
Doh!
These contests are getting out of hand. I hope for the good of the country this lawyer take them to the cleaners!!
radio-contest
stress and duress
This amount to torture. I wish Americans had the brains to realize the hurt this put on people. I would like to take each of the posters (obviously all cowards) and put them through some seeming innocent contest.
In 1951, William N. Oatis was taken into Czech custody on charges of espionage while working as bureau chief for the Associated Press in Prague. He was innocent, but signed a false confession after being held and interrogated for six days. He was kept awake for over 42 hours, after which he signed the confession. He described his ordeal in Life Magazine. “[After 40 hours of sleep deprivation:] The room was whirling. I could not seem to make my eyes-or my brain…..
#10: You’re right, it’s just the the Czech interrogation. All those contestants were forced to participate.
What ever happened to personal responsibility? If it’s volunatary, it might be sado-masochism, but it’s not “torture”. I think you’d do well to study real torture, then decide if this is the same thing. Somehow, this country has completely lost a sense of perspective. Next you’ll be comparing the contest promoters to the Nazi SS.
10. What are you talking about? This amounts to nothing more than greed and stupidity.
#12 – It does not amount to greed and stupidity….
Whoever this guy is, he’s dead. He died of an inexplicable action taken by himself under rather bizarre circumstances. I don’t know if he was a husband or a father, but he was certainly a son and likely a brother and a friend, and now he’s dead, suddenly, without explanation, leaving behind people who loved him and who are experiencing a particularly difficult kind of grief.
No… It isn’t likely that the Nissan dealership is responsible for this… But that grief has to go somewhere. That pain is going somewhere… and a natural human reaction when something so powerfully inexplicable as a suicide occurs, is to look for blame. And you guys all know about blame. It’s what 80% of the posts on the site are about. Blame is all we ever talk about. How did Bush screw up? Why is Microsoft at fault? Blame…. and punishment.
It might be wrong, but these people are focusing grief and pain, the likes of which I hope none of you have ever had to feel, on the Nissan dealer that sponsered the activity that represents the last thing Vega ever did.
Let’s have some fucking compassion and quit thinking we know how total strangers suffering in private lives are thinking.
#13 Compassion?? Thinking?? ROTFLMAO
you need to find another blog
They should sue Nissan directly. There should have been a label on the car:
WARNING: TOUCHING THIS CAR FOR LONGER THAN 47 HOURS CAUSES TEMPORARY INSANITY AND SUICIDAL TENDENCIES.
🙂
#15 – Exactly Right – Damn that Nissan
OFTLO- You know I agree with you 95% of the time but seriously, someone who kills himself because he didnt win a car, has got problems totally unrelated to reality, this contest, or the car dealer.
Also, my compassion is running a lttle thin this week, what with Va. Tech, the bombings in Baghdad, people who didnt kill themselves over a contest, this guy is pretty low on my sympathy list.
Darwin?
[totally off topic]
18, mark, left you a comment here: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=11043#comments
20. Got it, Thats your 5″ Cass.? That picture of Mercury is nice, thought it was a spot on my monitor at first.
[totally off topic, but if anyone gets interested in astronomy, it’s worth it]
21, mark, yes, before rework. Only $600 and great tech support (right here in the USA). Friendly and knowledgeable folks at Orion. Here’s the link, get a free catalog, great binocs, too. Too bad there’s no way to send you stuff about lasers (my specialty), oculars, other acc., etc.
http://www.telescope.com/jump.jsp?itemID=0&itemType=HOME_PAGE
Thanks, Ive been getting (and drooling) over their catalogs for years. The customization was 600, right?, thats scopes gotta be 1500 easy.
[totally off topic, anyone interested in astronomy that ain’t K-Mart?]
23, Mark, no the scope was about $620 incl. shipping, Customized, still less than $1K, and worth every dime. http://tinyurl.com/2lxjbn
You could always move up to 7″, but a higher price, about $1,600 without customization: http://tinyurl.com/3cgxyc
I’d be glad to custom build you a 16″ to 24″ from $190K to $350K, not including observatory dome / building. KTC, since 1984.
[Still, IMHO a useful waste of bandwidth! (pun intended)]
I say this in jest, but it really is true: This is simply another way that nature ‘thins the heard’. The human gene pool got just a wee bit stronger after that bullet was fired.
What ever happened to people being responsible for their actions? We’ve become a society where someone else is always to blame … and fingerpointing turns into frivolous lawsuits.
And, if someone has mental issues, I would hope friends and family would act BEFORE something happend to save their loved one, instead of simply being opportunistic AFTER the fact.
Just some of the thoughts that jumped in my head after reading the article.
Any of you guys see “Hands on a Hard Body?
http://tinyurl.com/2lfp9
The people who run these contests should know and expect that somebody, eventually was going to have a mental breakdown during one of these contests.
I think the dealership is liable. These kinds of promotions are abusive.
The same goes for half the reality TV shows.
#26, Greg Allen, that _is_ scary. I’d rather deal with the Borg.
Wow, this guy needs to be nominated for the Darwin awards…
Surprising enough, nobody’s wondering why he could go to a local K-Mart (that’s a department store right?!), be able to put his hands on a shotgun and ammunitions and shoot himself?!?!
#17 and #18 – Please note…. I’m not talking about the guy… Although anyone who had the sorts of problems that might cause him to kill himself has issues that are deserving of some sympathy….
But I was addressing the survivors and the processes their minds go through in dealing with what is obviously to them a devastating blow. Surely we can all understand that every death leaves survivors?
29. Sure OFTLO- I just cant wring my hands over this. 25. Said it best, this guy probably had issue before this and his family could have intervened then, instead of immediately hiring attorneys.
24. (Off topic), thats an incredible price, I bought my Nexstar in San Francisco about 10 years ago, the price was around 1500 not including the Plossl eyepieces I got seperately, or the tripod. Another 500. Prices must have come way down. It must be the motor and Go To computer. I dont see how you can live without that.