November 12, 2004
Silence In Boston
Three weeks and counting, and still no definitive word on the death of Victoria Snelgrove, the Emerson College student who died after being struck in the eye with a pepper pellet fired by an unidentified Boston Police officer during a riot in the wake of Boston's Game Seven ALCS victory over the New York Yankees. Code Blue Blog is wondering why:
It is remarkable that a high-speed metallic projectile can enter the brain, fracture several bones, injure a critical vascular structure and NOT kill this girl; yet, Victoria Snelgrove, the Boston Red Sox fan who was fatally injured during a melee following the ALCS game -- is said to have died after being hit EXTERNALLY on the eyeball with a PAINTBALL that was filled with pepper spray, and designed to explode on impact...and no one questions the mechanism of death.
The fact that this does not arouse anyone's curiosity confounds me, especially since this girl may have died from some other cause, which would alter all the ramifications of the current theory and explanation that the death was a direct cause of overzealous police and an unsafe crowd-control weapon. My previous posts have detailed the highly unlikely -- almost unprecidented -- chance that this injury would cause death. But does it matter?
What if she died from a misadministration of care in the ER?
Don't we need to know the mechanism of death in this case?
In this morning's Boston Globe, three reporters teamed on a story that confirmed that Boston Deputy Police Superintendent Robert O'Toole wasn't certified to use the FN 303 pepper-pellet gun that he ordered used on the crowd that night in Boston.
And in that piece, there is simply no mention of the word we ought to be most conerned with. And that word is autopsy. Why no questions about that?
POSTSCRIPT: Click here for a Boston Herald story about downtown bars that will get hit with fines and suspensions for a variety of violations that took place during the baseball postseason.
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Howdy all;
I’m no medical expert, but I do know something about paintballs. For fun, I use to fly my Radio controlled plane around while my buddies tried to shoot it down with their paintball guns. Normally, a paintball gun fires the ball at 300 feet per second or less. At this speed the paintballs would hit my plane and splatter on the outside. My plane was made of a tough Plastic, so it didn’t really do any damage, but it sure was fun for all.
One day my buddy got a new paint ball gun that was capable of adjusting the velocity of the paintball. So, he turned it up to 450 feet per second and proceeded to go about shooting at my plane as it flew over. I didn’t know he had done that, and to my surprise, upon inspection of the plane after it landed, large holes were shot completely through the wing. And to top it off, none of the holes had paint marks on them. It seams that at the higher velocity of 450 feet per second, the paintballs no longer exploded as designed, but instead blasted its way through the wing and remained in tack.
I understand that some other police are saying they will continue to use the Pepperballs guns, but less powerful versions that fire at a lower velocity. This makes me think that perhaps the cops gun that fired the killer Pepperball might have been some kind of high velocity gun and the Pepperballs might have failed to explode properly at those velocities.
One other thing, to make your paintballs last a long time some people freeze them. More than once my buddies playing in paintball tournaments have been hit by a frozen paintball because somebody didn’t give them enough time to thaw out. A frozen paintball is basically the same as a rock.
Well, that’s my 2 cents worth.
Roger Hill
Posted by:
at November 24, 2004 01:16 PM
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04:35 PM