Disturbing Pro-Gun Campaign

A hotly debated 911 call has been circulating around Youtube and other places on the Internet for at least two years now. The audio recording–apparently featuring the violent death of an elderly woman named Ruth Price as she sits on the phone with a 911 operator–has been debated on snopes, Yahoo, and several urban legends sites. It’s not certain whether the call was staged for instructional or educational purposes of if it is indeed the now public domain death of a human being. If the latter is true, then it’s a tragedy. I’m including a link to the file here, but I warn you it is disturbing:

In addition to the disgust and controversy sparked from the Ruth Price 911 call, there has also emerged a “What would Ruth have done?” pro-gun campaign. Basically, websites such as keepandbeararms.com are arguing that, if Ruth had only owned a gun, then things would have turned out differently. The merit of their argument is up for debate, but the real horror here is that a person’s terrifying last moments are being transformed into an infomerical.

When apparently normal people do things like this, who needs to be afraid of the supernatural?

Texas Woman Spends the Week With Boyfriend’s Corpse

The Associated Press reported today about a Texas woman who has recently been cohabitating with a corpse. The unnamed 45-year-old female is said to have shared her apartment for no less than a week with a cadaver–that of her boyfriend, William Drake (50), who had died of natural causes from an unrevealed condition for which he had been receiving dialysis treatment. When asked why she had allowed the corpse to remain on her own couch for a whole week, she responded that her boyfriend “didn’t want to leave the apartment.”

Honey, I'm home...

The woman does have a history of mental health issues for which she has been hospitalized previously. She is not currently being charged with a crime, but she has been committed to a mental hospital pending an evaluation.

(Sources: The Associated Press and the Tyler Morning Telegraph)

One might feel compelled to focus on the “feakish” nature of the this story, but the scenario is actually rather tragic. We can only ponder what a mentally vulnerable person experiences when faced with sudden loss. Still, can you imagine living with a dead body for a whole week? Apparently, the situation was discovered when the woman’s own brother reported a stench coming from her apartment. How long might this have continued if not for the intervention by the brother and the police? We can only wonder, as is the case for a lot of the circumstances surrounding this mysterious account of cold cohabitation.