A grief-stricken pet lover took his own life just days after his elderly cat died in his arms.
Bournemouth Coroner’s Court heard how heartbroken Michael McAleese, 44, had posted a moving YouTube video tribute to 13-year-old tabby Sophie, five days after she passed away from a stroke, saying: “This is in her memory. She was such a wonderful little cat.
“This is a montage tribute to my beloved Sophie cat. I loved her so much and still do.”
Eight days later Mr McAleese’s body was found at his lodgings in Hillcrest Road, Parkstone, Poole. He had taken a drugs cocktail including Secobarbital, which is no longer prescribed by the NHS.
But pathologist Dr Sherie Haider said toxicology tests had shown that the level of the ‘dangerous’ sedative had been within the therapeutic range and she was unable to ascertain the cause of Mr McAleese’s death.
His landlady Adriana van Dijk told the court how she gave him Sophie because he had grown so attached to her.
“As soon as Michael saw Sophie he seemed to fall in love with her. I was away a lot so he looked after her. She had the sweetest nature and they totally clicked. She was like a child to him. He was devastated when she died and phoned me in the middle of the night. He slept with her for three days until he couldn’t stand the smell any longer.
“I tried to persuade him life was more than a cat, but in his case it wasn’t.”
In a statement, coroner’s officer David Tong said a book had been found be-side Mr McAleese’s body with instructions on how to commit suicide, and several notes were also discovered.
He added: “The flat was very tidy; it looked like everything was prepared for his death.”
Coroner Sheriff Payne recorded a verdict Mr McAleese took his own life.
Neighbors of an animal hoarder in Ohio called the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office to check on the man after they hadn’t seen him for a while.
A deputy investigated and found the man upstairs. He had been dead at least a couple weeks.
“I’ve been to a lot of bad situations since I’ve been here,” Lawrence County Dog Warden Benny Call said. “I believe this was the worst.”
The floor of the home was covered in trash, feces and urine. Call said the man lived alone and had about 50 dogs.
Some of the dogs had starved to death; others had taken extreme measures to survive.
“Some of his body had been eaten,” neighbor Charlie Jenkins said.
Some dogs were in such bad shape they had to be put down.
“It hurts when you see a dog like that,” Call said.
Eight dogs were taken back to the Lawrence County Dog Shelter in Ironton. The dog warden said his agency had tried to help with the man’s dogs, but the man always turned them away.
“He didn’t want our help,” Call said. “He’d just run us off if we went out there. He probably cared for the dogs, but he just got overwhelmed.”
Call said there are still a few dogs that lived in the home that haven’t been rounded up yet. Police also found several cats in a separate trailer on that property, some of which had died as well.
So far, authorities haven’t found any relatives to notify.
“He just wanted to be by himself all the time, just be with his dogs,” Jenkins said. “That was his life.”
A woman in Switzerland has diad after trying to live on sunlight alone.
It was part of a spiritual journey for the woman, identified in the story with the fake name Anna Good, who was reportedly inspired by a 2010 documentary In the Beginning There Was Light.
The film tells the story of people who follow a concept called breatharianism and they claim to survive without eating or drinking anything for weeks, years or even decades.
Good saw the movie in 2010, the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger reports. She started on the diet, going so far as to spit out her saliva.
In early 2011, after her children hadn’t heard from Good, they went to her home and found her body.
Police conducted an investigation and on Wednesday, district attorney Thomas Burgi told the newspaper the case was closed because there was no evidence of “foreign influence” in Good’s death.
Can you have a totally one-sided relationship with a complete stranger?
For one family in North Dakota a years-long mystery ended when they learned “Jim,” who sent them post cards as if they were close friends, had picked them at random.
For the Olson family of Turtle Lake, the sad part was finding out that “Jim” was Jim Moore of Mankato, Minn., a complete stranger who started sending them post cards seven years ago, had died.
Fed up with only receiving bills and coupons in the mail, Moore had come to realize he missed receiving real, handwritten letters. So he got on the Internet and picked a random Midwestern town, and a random last name: Olson. So began his one-sided correspondence with Stan and Sheila Olson.
The Olsons would receive a postcard about three times a year, which was vague enough to make them think Jim was someone they had met before. The messages were brief, such as:
“Was in Paris and saw Francois and Emilie. They send their regards.”
Sheila, 52, kept all of Jim’s postcards in a box and soon friends and relatives were asking after Jim.
“Our kids have really grown up with this,” she told the Star Tribune. “He wrote like he knew us. That was what was so funny.”
In January, Moore, 38, passed away from complications of bile duct cancer. Moore’s friend, Andrew Reeves, wrote to the Olsons to explain the postcards.
“Sadly, the art exhibition has closed,” Reeves’ note concluded. “No more postcards from Jim will randomly appear in the mail.”
Sheila wrote back to give Reeves her condolences, and explain to him how Jim’s postcards gave her family something to smile about.
“My dad had a quirky sense of humor, too,” she said. “If he were alive, he would have tried this himself.”
A coroner in England wants authorities to be allowed to enter the homes of obsessive hoarders after hearing how a woman was found dead beneath a 3ft pile of rubbish in her living room.
An inquest into Linda Parkes’ death heard waste filled every room in her house “from floor to ceiling”. Firefighters, called after reports of a blaze at the terraced house, had to squeeze through 2ft gaps in the rubbish to search each room.
It took three days to find Miss Parkes’ body.
Currently, local authorities only have the powers to enter private houses where they believe there is a risk to public health – but not when they suspect a fire hazard.
Paul McCandless, Derby and South Derbyshire Assistant Deputy coroner, said: “I will write to the relevant Department of State, as that is something that should be given proper consideration to. Local authorities should have the power to enter the house if they have reasonable cause to believe that there is hoarding going on within the property and one that does pose a fire risk.”
David Paul, the station manager at Ascot Drive fire station, was one of the first crews at the incident, which happened in Wellington Street, Long Eaton, on January 14 last year.
He told the inquest: “Access to the building was very restricted. If you can imagine, we came through the front door and it was like a crawl-way. We wouldn’t have been able to stand up at that depth.
“We had to crawl through the top of the doorways to get in the rooms. The living room was a solid mess – you’d just be crawling and your back would be touching the ceiling. In the kitchen, the mass was about five feet deep. There was rubbish bags, human excrement in carrier bags, rotting food and rodent droppings. My suspicions were that the bathroom in the property was not in use and hadn’t been for some time.”
Firefighters and police spent three days clearing the rubbish in an effort to find Miss Parkes, 59, who had not been seen since the fire.
Mr Paul said: “We had two refuse lorries and a skip to remove the rubbish downstairs and two rooms upstairs were virtually full from floor to ceiling.”
Miss Parkes’ body was found by police officers in the living room on the following Monday, January 17.
Mr Paul told the inquest: “She was found in the ground floor in the back room. She was quite some depth down into the debris and covered with three feet of debris.”
An investigation found that the fire had started in the kitchen after waste material which was piled by the oven toppled over on to the naked flame from the hob ring.
Miss Parkes’ partner, Geoffrey Rumas, told the court that she often lit the hob rings to warm the house as there was no central heating.
A post-mortem examination showed Miss Parkes, 59, died from inhaling fumes from the fire.
Recording a verdict of death by misadventure, Mr McCandless said: “It was known that Linda Parkes was someone who had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and who would be referred to as a hoarder.”
One South African man has died and sixteen others were rushed to hospital after they collapsed at a faith healing event run by a controversial Nigerian televangelist.
The Higher Life Conference, which also takes place in Britain and the United States, is staged by Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, who can reputedly perform miracles such as healing the paralysed.
An estimated 150,000 people, among them children and terminally ill patients, travelled to the Greenpoint Stadium in Cape Town, Soth Africa, to attend the three-day Pentecostal event over the weekend.
“Pastor Chris”, one of Nigeria’s most wealthy evangelist preachers with a global following of millions, is believed to be worth as much as £30 million.
Simon Williams, a 56-year-old pastor from nearby Paarl, was taken from hospital intensive care to the event by his family. He collapsed and died from renal failure inside the stadium.
Dr Wayne Smith, head of disaster medicine for Cape Town, said he treated about 30 patients in the stadium’s medical centre and sent 16 to hospital.
“Some of them had travelled long distances to get there, they had ongoing medical issues and were in a lot of pain,” he said.
