Quad Rugby/Article - Suicide or Murder

UNITED STATES QUAD RUGBY ASSOCIATION

ON THE DANGER OF LEAPING TO CONCLUSIONS

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Science, AAFS President Don Harper Mills astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story.

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"On 23 March, 1994," Mills began, "the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. The decedent had jumped from the top of a 10 story building intending to commit suicide, leaving a note indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window that killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some window washers.

''That Opus was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide," Mills continued. But the fact that his suicidal intent would not have been successful because of the safety net was reason to think in terms of homicide. "The room on the ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife," Mills noted. "They were arguing and he was threatening her with the shotgun. He was so upset that when he pulled the trigger, he missed his wife and the pellets went through the window, striking Opus.

"When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded. The old man said it was his long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention of murdering her--therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident. That is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.

"The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun six weeks before the fatal incident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing his father's propensity to use the shotgun threateningly, had loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son in the death of Ronald Opus."

There was an exquisite twist. "Further investigation revealed that the son had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder," Mills related. This led him, Ronald Opus, to jump off the 10 story building on March 23, only to be killed by a shotgun blast through a ninth-story window.

"The medical examiner," Mills concluded, "closed the case as a suicide".

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