Man drives 12miles with headless corpse
 

The following story is in today's Sydney Morning Herald:

A drunken driver in the US state of Georgia hit a telephone pole support wire that decapitated his passenger, then drove 20km home and slept in his bloodied clothes, leaving the headless body in his truck, police said.

A neighbour walking with his young daughter yesterday morning discovered Daniel Brohm's headless corpse in the truck in John Kemper Hutcherson's driveway in Marietta and called authorities, said Corporal Dana Pierce, county police spokesman.

Officers found Hutcherson asleep inside his home. He was visibly drunk and his clothes were bloody, authorities said. They later found Brohm's severed head at the crash site.

"It's hard for one to imagine that you would drive miles from a crash site to your home, turning in various directions, and yet not know what has happened to a passenger sitting next to you," Pierce said.

Hutcherson, 21, was charged with vehicular homicide, driving under the influence and failure to stop at an accident with death or injury. He was jailed on a $143,000 bond.

Police said Hutcherson and Brohm - friends since high school - were drinking at a bar Saturday night and left after Brohm said he felt sick.

Brohm, 23, apparently was leaning out of the window when Hutcherson hit the support wire about a kilometre from the bar.

*Shakes head* Amazing.

Brohm wasn't complaining. :dead:

Woo, yet another reason I won't touch the stuff!!

What, CW, 'cause it's causing people's heads to pop of now and then? I've heard of people "losing their heads", but I didn't know they meant it this way. I'm going to cut down.

I've spent a few evenings in the company of headless torso's...who hasn't? Most company parties are of this variety. :3eye:

the gene pool needs a little chlorine from time to time. guess it was time in georgia.

Indirectly, yes :D

Wow...um.....wow. :dead: :greenface :thumbsdn: :eek: :(

So--anyone else have a comparable story to share?? :yelsick:

omg
 

If you drive around 20 km with a headless corpse in your car, after a Saturday Night of drinking...

You might be a redneck :p

This story has haunted me for the last few days. I can but still can't imagine it happening. I have such conflicting feelings about the whole situation. Is the driver a blithering idiot for driving so drunk he killed his best friend so therefore he should have the book thrown at him? Or does he deserve compassion for the loss of his friend in such tragic circumstances? Is anyone else really torn over this?

Both. :(
One from family, one from the law.

They should take away his driver's licence for DUI and then send him to old sparky for such a willful disregard of the lives of himself and others that it cost someone their life.

The victims are the family of the headless guy because they lost a family member and the family of the guy who did it because he should be punished for doing it.

As a side note, the headless guy is at least partially responsible for what happened because he drank that much, let his friend drink that much, and still got in the truck with him.

This isn't a complicated situation.

The family of the headless guy was asking for the release of the driver. They want him out of jail.

That doesn't make him any less culpable for his actions.

I'd say that he is directly responsible for his friend's death. Being drunk isn't an excuse.

I didn't imply anything. I just said the family of the headless guy wants the driver out of jail.

The driver is certainly an alcoholic. Alcoholics will do amazing things while in a blackout and have no memory of doing them afterwards. The friend was partially responsible for his own demise since he got into a car with a drunk driver after having imbibed so much himself that he could no longer make decent judgements about such things.

Everyone thinks they're bullet proof when they're 21. Add enough 80 proof whiskey to that mindset, and you have someone who has left rational thought far behind. I pity everyone involved. The driver should definately do a stretch in a cell, but doesn't deserve the death penalty. He didn't deliberately kill his friend and his friend went willingly in the car with him. The driver will have to spend the rest of his life with the knowledge of what he did. The thought of THAT punishment makes me shudder. People take their OWN lives over stuff like that.

You have too much faith in peoples' willingness to punish themselves and I have too much experience in peoples' ability to rationalize and delude themselves.

The only thing that prevented anyone else from dying in that situation is chance.

I agree that people in general are very good about living lives filled with denial about both the world around them and the consequences of their own actions. However, the act of accidently decapitating your own friend and driving home spattered in blood with his headless body next to you is something that only someone who is quite literally insane could ignore. Despite what they may say on the evening news, most of us do still retain some sense of right and wrong. The sociopaths of society are still a small minority. I think that young man will have nightmares and be filled with a horrible sense of remorse for the rest of his days.

Well, they'd had their warning...

http://www.mdjonline.com/articles/20...8/10154573.txt

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Cobb County police officer stopped the pair at the intersection of Johnson Ferry and Lassiter roads in March 2001 because the officer noticed they weren't wearing their seatbelts, according to records obtained from Cobb County State Court.

The officer then discovered that Hutcherson, then 17, and Brohm, then 19, had been drinking. The officer also found two 12 packs of Ice House beer in the car and an opened beer container, court records show.

Both were taken to the Cobb County Adult Detention Center and given multiple citations, the reports state.

Brohm was charged with possession of alcohol by a minor. His court records were sealed after he successfully completed his sentence.

Hutcherson, who was driving the car, was charged with DUI. He pleaded guilty, was ordered take a 17-hour class on the dangers of drinking and driving, spent a day in jail, was placed on probation and ordered to perform community service.

Look--addiction is real. Nobody seems to understand this--even after stories like this one are circulated. Ins. Co. no longer pay for addiction treatment.--talk to them about it.

He'll probably sue the utility that put that guy wire there and retire rich. :mad:

Yo, Bruce! What's with the gloomy tag line? Lighten up there, big guy! You can't be THAT old and if you DID vanish, I for one would actually miss you, and I'm not an old man. ;)

This situation reminds me of the chick that hit the homeless guy with her car and left him dying, stuck to the grillwork and windshield, in her garage for three days ...

Of course, he lingered a bit.

Oh, and I wonder if the headless fellah said anything like "hey Y'all, watch this ..." as he leaned out the window ...

What does addiction have to do with this?

And I understand addiction better than you might suppose.

My point is perhaps these two men had addiction issues with alcohol that were ignored. Typically, people who drink to the extreme these two did have alcoholism issues. Some comments in this thread called for the driver's execution for the tragedy---I just thought maybe there were other things at play besides two kids going out and tossing a few back.

See my post at 09-07-2004, 01:49 PM.

Well, exactly. It wasn't taken seriously. They slapped their wrists.

My point was that their behavior was noticed and part of the public record.

They knew, their family knew, and their friends and neighbors knew.

Noone is responsible for them not getting "treatment" for their "addiction" but themselves.

I doubt that they were addicts, just regularly, as in consistantly, drunk. That's not addiction, that's just stupid.

Ah, well. I stand corrected. Consistently drunk people are supposed to realize they've a problem and get working on it? My experience has been that it is very difficult to get an actively using/drinking individual to see their own behavior. Much like some people having heart attacks--they are in denial, "Oh, it's just heartburn..." they put it off and put it off and finally they keel over and somebody calls 911. Or, should we say, "He was responsible for getting treatment himself."--?

All I'm saying is that there is a difference between the getting drunk all of the time and being an alcoholic. It's a hard distinction to make sometimes.

Just curious, TS. How does one make that distinction? Isn't that the definition of an alcoholic - someone who gets drunk all the time? And according to what someone posted earlier, it wasn't like BOTH these guys didn't already get a wake up call. So how do you figure? :confused:

the easiest way i have ever found to explain it is - do you need to drink or do you want to drink? drunks want, alcoholics need.

I dunno... that sounds a lot to me like "I can quit anytime I want to."

i don't know about anyone else, but it worked that way in my head. for a period of 4-5 years, i drank 8/9 pints of guinness and maybe a shot or two of something pretty much every night. my theory was that if i was an alcoholic that meant i needed a drink. on the nights that i didn't go out and have a few i never had issues and it wasn't a difficult situation. when my wife got pregnant, she couldn't couldn't have anything to drink so i just stopped drinking. no issues. i didn't have anything to drink for about 2 years and now i have a beer or two on occasion but not often. from what i understand if i was an alcoholic the stopping would have been a difficult process. i may be mistaken though. again, my path isn't for everyone and all that jazz.

That's interesting. You hear a lot about people with "addictive personalities," but I've always wondered about the opposite condition. Extreme detachment, I guess you'd call it. With regards to my body, I definitely fall into that latter category--my freshman year in college, I lost weight instead of gaining the typical "freshman fifteen" because often I was too lazy to get up and go to the cafeteria. I could go to sleep with my stomach grumbling, just tune it out. But I wonder if maybe emotional detachment goes along with having a non-addictive personality?

From what I understand, addiction is a sort of complex mix of genes and environment. You have a given number of genes, let's just say 8, for the sake of discussion, that can be turned off or on for addiction. Then you throw in environmental factors on top of that. So a person who is born with all 8 addiction genes turned off could be raised by a couple of drunks, loose their entire family in a car wreck, be homeless on the street and still not turn to alcohol. On the other hand, someone born with all 8 genes turned on could be raised somewhere where alcohol doesn't even exist, travel out to the real world at age 21, have one drink and be addicted from that time on. Most of us fall in the middle of those two extremes. I think that how it works, anyhow.

Alcoholism does tend to run in the family. Of course it doesn't mean you WILL become an alcoholic, you just run a higher risk of it...like high blood pressure or allergies. A friend of mine's father is one in a family long known to have drinking problems and I think he described it to me well. He said that when the alcohol gets into his system, something in his head clicks and he feels 'just right' and the more he drinks the better he feels in his head. However, when the alcohol starts to get metabolized and leaves his system, he feels increasingly 'not right' and wants to drink again to 'feel alright' again. Once it passes, he feels fine again. He does drink, but only on occasions like birthdays, Xmas, wedding anniversary and the like. He's very aware that he could turn into a raging alcoholic but refuses to let himself do it...mainly because he watched his own father drink himself to death. Alcoholic poisoning.

It is a complex issue, and almost everything or anything in your life can be a factor, genetic predispostion to chemical dependence, genetic predispostion to addictive personality, social conditions in both the family and larger in-group, availability of alcohol, etc., etc.

An important question to ask though is whether the distinction between drunk and alcoholic is really that important. I'd rather work with an alcoholic who comes to work everyday and then goes home and drinks himself unconscious than deal with kids like these who let an inability to control their excesses get one of them killed.

My own experience is similar to lookout's. For me, it was drinking too much in college. I got drunk 2-3 times a week. Once I left that environment, I became a responsble, moderate drinker. Now I only drink a couple beers at a time, and do it infrequently.

A casual observer might have thought I was an alcoholic back then, but I don't think I was. I'm certainly not one now.

that's a great way to explain it, and you're right, most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

i guess i should point out that i was never a fall down drunk. although i consumed a high volume of alcohol, it was usually over a 5 hour or more period of time. in fact most of my friends at the time would get pissed at me because i never appeared intoxicated and never got hungover. i was always buzzed but i drank slowly so i was never loaded. at the same time i would see folks stroll into the bar slam 5 beers and a shot in a one hour, get completely loaded, act stupid and i would be thinking to myself "wow, they have a problem."

Another thing I have noticed about alcoholics (and I've known several over the course of my life, some in recovery, some not) is that an alcoholic without fail will remember their first drink in precise detail. Like, "I was 16, it was the homecoming dance, and me and the guys got hold of a 5th of Jack Daniels"). Most people without a propensity to become alcoholic will only have a sort of vague memory of their first drink, "Hmmm, well, I suppose it would have been during my time at college. I can't really remember what I had. Probably a beer at a kegger or something.")