http://www.thewgalchannel.com/news/4584062/detail.html

Yesterday was a bad day here. First the kids and then below. I wonder what if any charges the other 14 year old will get.

http://www.thewgalchannel.com/news/4586050/detail.html

This lady was going to walk her grand daughter home from school. The kids saw it happen.

Most deaths around here are usually gang and drug related.

Out of curiosity, have there been any publicized suicides (beyond just an obit) in your area recently? I was reading some very unsettling research about links between suicides in the news and subsequent accident rates.

Not that I'm aware of, but then I don't read news unless I hear of something going on. Both of these accidents affected me yesterday. The 14 yr olds accident backed up traffic for hours. The elderly lady getting hit forced me to detour my jaunt to the Perry Dell for my Wed lunch date.

However, these two things were the buzz at work and still are today. Interesting theory.

I'll have to dig up the book I was reading and scan the graphs they had of their research. It was very convincing.

Basically, they were able to link a dramatic increase in accidental road and pedestrian deaths to publicized suicides by people of similar race, age, gender, etc; for a week or so after the publicity of the original death. They hypothesized that the "social proof" of someone else killing themselves is enough to influence their peers on an unconscious level. It sounds far fetched to me, but their data was hard to dispute.

Hey Fil you live in a small town or something? Stuff like that happens every day here and having friends in EMS and Fire departments ..there is tons more that doesn't even make the news.

Post the name of the book if you find it, Sanchek. Sounds interesting.

Hey Fil you live in a small town or something? Stuff like that happens every day here and having friends in EMS and Fire departments ..there is tons more that doesn't even make the news.

The county has about 380k people. We aren't small but we aren't large. I'm pretty much dead center of Philly, DC, and the state capitol is roughly 30min away with Baltimore about 45min away.

As I said above we have lots of gang related murders, shootings, kidnappings, carjackings, drug busts blah blah.....but it's not every day two 14 year olds go on a joy ride and one dies nor is it common place to have an elementry school witness the death of one of the students grand parents. I pity you if that stuff happens every day there. We have had our share of school shootings ( 3 since I've lived here). The last one was two adults arguing in the parking lot, it was murder suicide. But the children didn't see what happened like in this case.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0688128165/ref=pd_ir_imp3/102-1977124-6867319?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

Is the book I read about it in. It went through their research data and methodology to prove a point about how strong the impulse to follow the crowd is.