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Medical examiner
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 Misc
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Medical examiner
"On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of one, Ronald Opus, and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound of the head. The decedent had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide (he left a note indicating his despondency).
As Opus fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him instantly.
The first of several interesting side notes is that neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect the window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide because of this.
"Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "a person who sets out to commit suicide ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he/she intended."
The fact that Opus was shot on the way to (what was to be) certain death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide. But the fact that his intent to commit suicide would not have been successful eventually caused the medical examiner to feel he had homicide before him.
The room on the ninth floor where the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. At the time of the suicide attempt, the couple were arguing and the husband was threatening the wife with the shotgun. The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the shotgun pellets went through the a window striking Opus as he happened to be falling toward the safety net.
When one intends to kill subject A but instead kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded.
The old man said it was his long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her -- therefore, the murder of Opus appeared to be an accident. That is because the gun had been accidentally loaded.
The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal incident.
It turned out that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and her son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun to threaten his mother, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would end up shooting his mother for him. The case then became one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.
Further investigation revealed that the son [who turned out to be Ronald Opus] had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder through his father's consistent use of a shotgun in anger to threaten his mother.
In his frustration and anger that stemmed from his greed, Ronald Opus chose to end his own life and jumped off the ten-story building on March 23, only to be killed by his father with the shotgun blast (through the ninth story window) which Ronald engineered to originally kill his own mother.
The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
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