Selfish Killer Suicides

I have posted in the past (or perhaps I just think I have) .....

Suicide By Car Crash

.... about how a suicide by car crash can actually be one of the worst and most selfish (rather like airline pilot suicides by air crash), because it can often also result in the death or serious injury of others, who were not intending to commit suicide. 

This was tragically confirmed recently when Anne Crook, a 43 year old from St Helens in Lancashire, decided to kill herself by car crash (her phone messages confirmed this later). She drove at 94mph along the M57 motorway, until she eventually managed to cross the boundary and crash her car head on into to a car going the other way. 

She killed the driver of the other car, Pauline Kingdom, a 64 year old retired school teacher. Crook was later described as "profoundly selfish" as she was "prepared to kill others" by the judge, Garrett Byrne .... but she only got a sentence of 4 years 8 months, for what was essentially a premeditated murder. 

Why so low a sentence for what is murder or at the very least manslaughter? If I decided to blow myself up, and kill lots of others, then if I somehow survived this event, but had killed or maimed others, I would be charged with multiple murders, or attempted murder. What makes a car different from a bomb as my method of doing this?

However, she is not alone in this selfishness .... There are so many examples that I selected only a few:

Canada June 3rd, 2010: Samuel R. Shimpach, an 18-year-old Vancouver man told police he was trying to end his own life when he crashed into three cars in a school parking lot, causing minor injuries to a woman whose car was crushed by sliding wreckage .... Vancouver Police Department recommended three counts of first-degree malicious mischief, one for each car damaged by Shimpach’s truck.

On October 7, 2011: Ontario, Canada, the 16-year-old driver of a speeding car crashed through a concrete sound wall, and went airborne onto the busy QEW was trying to kill himself  .... he was expected to survive. Police witnesses say a Ford Fusion was travelling at a high rate of speed along South Service Rd. When it smashed through the sound wall and was launched onto the highway, hitting two other vehicles, including a minivan. A man and woman in the minivan suffered injuries not considered to be life-threatening.

7th of July 2012: Torquay, Devon, England, a police witness reported seeing the driver of a Vauxhall Vectra swerve into the path of the family’s VW Golf killing a two-year-old boy. The boy’s mother, was in hospital fighting for her life, she also lost her unborn child in the tragedy, and his father was in a critical condition too. The suicide driver, a Polish man, in his 20s, was arrested at the scene, but died hours later in hospital.

September 24, 2018: The death of Desmond J. Clark, 28, of Plattsburgh, in the town of Schroon was ruled suicide by an Essex County coroner, based on police and witness accounts that Clark hit the pick-up truck intentionally. He was fleeing state troopers, as the only suspect in an  armed robbery carried out the previous day, when he crossed the median of Interstate 87 and died in a head-on collision ... “From witness accounts, it appears as though he intentionally drove head-on into the truck,” Robert LaFountain, head of the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation said. “There was also a fireball that was quickly extinguished.”

Luckily the truck’s driver, Curtis E. Smith, 52, and front-seat passenger Linda M. Hutti, 57,  from New York were transported to Glens Falls Hospital, he with back and leg injuries and she with a back injury but were expected to survive.

As I said, selfish acts with no thought for the people whose lives they were threatening to take as they tried to take their own .....