INTENDED VICTIM
A man died from a shotgun wound to his head. This man had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide. He left a note indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide anyway because of this. “Ordinarily,” Dr. Mills continued, “a person who sets out to commit suicide ultimately succeeds, I even thought the mechanism might not be what he intended. That Opus was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide. But the fact that his suicidal intent would not have been successful caused the medical examiner…
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