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A Tucson man was found dead Monday evening hanging in his rappelling gear from a cliff on Mount Hopkins south of Tucson.
He had been attacked by bees and suffered hundreds of stings, but investigators don’t know if that caused his death.
Steven Wallace Johnson, 55, was an experienced hiker and climber who went to rappel on Friday, said Lt. Raoul Rodriguez of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department.
One preliminary theory is that Johnson disturbed the bees while hammering his spike into the cliff, Rodriguez said.
Johnson’s dog, which also was attacked by bees, was found dead on top of the ridge where Johnson was rappelling, Rodriguez said.
When Johnson did not show up to work Monday, co-workers reported him missing to Tucson police. Authorities were told that he planned to hike in the Santa Ritas and at other sites in Santa Cruz County.
Deputies of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department and its search and rescue unit found his body.
The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office will conduct an autopsy to determine his cause of death.
a nightmare way to go - so disturbing…
Volkskalender / Lahrer Hinkender Bote / Illustration / 08 (by micky the pixel)
Grosser Volkskalender des Lahrer hinkenden Boten für 1905
Illustration: Weltbegebenheiten / Tod von Papst Leo XII
Coder and information activist Aaron Swartz took his life on Friday, and in the wake of his death the outpouring of grief from the tech community is palpable. While Swartz wrote publicly about depression, many have speculated that his legal troubles compounded the sense of hopelessness that drove him to take his life. On Saturday afternoon, Swartz’s family and his partner released a statement corroborating that idea:
Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
The family said that Aaron’s funeral will be held in Highland Park, IL, on Tuesday January 15.
Alex Stamos, the CTO of Artemis Internet and an expert witness who was working with Swartz’s attorneys to testify in the the April US vs. Swartz trial, also wrote a long post detailing what he knew of the case. The Feds accused Swartz of logging on to MIT’s network illegally and using that access, “to download a major portion of JSTOR’s archive onto his computers.” The Department of Justice officially accused him of wire fraud, computer fraud, recklessly damaging a protected computer, among other charges.
But for all those grandiose claims, expert witness Stamos wrote “I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail…”
![biomedicalephemera:
Boomslang - Bucephalus viridis [now Dispholidus typus]
Where the elapids and viperids have fangs at the front of their mouth for easy envenomation, boomslangs (a member of the Colubrids) are equipped with regular teeth at the front of their mouth, and venom-injecting fangs at the back. Because of this, even though their venom is extremely hemotoxic, they rarely are able to inject enough into a larger animal (such as a human) to cause death.
However, the bite of a boomslang is not to be underestimated - as it’s not always clear when the fangs have punctured the skin due to the other teeth leaving puncture wounds, medical help should always be sought out. The venom is almost completely hemotoxic, and the lack of neurotoxic symptoms can lead bite victims to believe that there was either no envenomation, or that they can just wait for their body to process the toxin.
This mindset is what led to the 1957 death of esteemed herpetologist Karl Schmidt. He believed that the amount of venom he received was negligible, but 28 hours later his blood was so thin that it was coming out of every hole in the body, including his eyes and ears[!!!], and no amount of medical treatment could have saved him. Early antivenin administration is critical.
Luckily, even if you’re in its natural habitat (forested areas in sub-Saharan Africa), you will probably never encounter a boomslang in the wild. They’re timid, generally dwell in trees more than 20 feet above the forest floor, and would much rather eat a small bird than waste their venom on a human. Most bites occur when someone tries to handle or kill one.
Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa: No. XXII. Andrew Smith, March 1845.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/c04425d836f7d3531469b5ae504d6e7a/tumblr_mfpmfp0SSL1qk931ho1_500.jpg)
Boomslang - Bucephalus viridis [now Dispholidus typus]
Where the elapids and viperids have fangs at the front of their mouth for easy envenomation, boomslangs (a member of the Colubrids) are equipped with regular teeth at the front of their mouth, and venom-injecting fangs at the back. Because of this, even though their venom is extremely hemotoxic, they rarely are able to inject enough into a larger animal (such as a human) to cause death.
However, the bite of a boomslang is not to be underestimated - as it’s not always clear when the fangs have punctured the skin due to the other teeth leaving puncture wounds, medical help should always be sought out. The venom is almost completely hemotoxic, and the lack of neurotoxic symptoms can lead bite victims to believe that there was either no envenomation, or that they can just wait for their body to process the toxin.
This mindset is what led to the 1957 death of esteemed herpetologist Karl Schmidt. He believed that the amount of venom he received was negligible, but 28 hours later his blood was so thin that it was coming out of every hole in the body, including his eyes and ears[!!!], and no amount of medical treatment could have saved him. Early antivenin administration is critical.
Luckily, even if you’re in its natural habitat (forested areas in sub-Saharan Africa), you will probably never encounter a boomslang in the wild. They’re timid, generally dwell in trees more than 20 feet above the forest floor, and would much rather eat a small bird than waste their venom on a human. Most bites occur when someone tries to handle or kill one.
Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa: No. XXII. Andrew Smith, March 1845.
Im trying to draw something new everyday. Here is what I drew yesterday.
Bitter Mermaid2012, ink and graphite
© Mai Ly Degnan
I love it when: in sourcing an unattributed image I find on tumblr, I find an artist I like…and then find that the artist is on tumblr…
Tinkerbell Handbag by James Piatt
The charlatans
Honoré Daumier, from Némésis médicale illustrée (illustrated medical nemesis) vol. 2, by François Fabre, Paris, 1840.
(Source: archive.org)
Hey, you scurvy knave, what are you doing with my tree?
(GIF Courtesy…)
Suicide by hanging, with an old rope wound five times about the neck.
The lack of cyanosis (blue skin - generally caused by lack of oxygen) and the marked ecchymoses from the rope lead the forensic pathologist to conclude that this man hanged himself, or was hanged while still alive.
For a prolonged period during the 1800s and early 1900s, strangulation and staging a hanging was a crime not unheard of, and a fairly popular tactic for disguising a murder. If the decedent was dead prior to hanging, the ecchymoses (ruptured blood vessels) would not have formed as they did, and if he was strangled manually, significant cyanosis would appear prior to death. Because there is a lack of cyanosis and a presence of imprints from the rope, one can conclude that he was alive when he was hanged. Though it does not completely rule out murder, this conclusion would likely lead to a finding of “suicide” on the death certificate, barring suspicion of forced hanging.
Atlas of Legal Medicine. Dr. Eduard von Hofmann, 1898.
