Jul 2 1881
President James A. Garfield is shot in a train station by Charles Julius Guiteau, a lunatic trying to become ambassador either to Austria or France. Garfield lingers for three months before finally dying.
Jul 2 1937
Attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe in an airplane, Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific with her navigator, Fred Noonan.
Jul 2 1942
On page six, the New York Times reports Germany's mass extermination of 700,000 Jews, by use of poison gas.
Jul 2 1947
Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot witness a "large glowing object" zoom across the sky at 400 or 500 miles per hour. The next day, Mac Brazel discovers the wreckage of a flying saucer -- not fragments of an experimental balloon composed of neoprene -- on a remote pasture outside Roswell, New Mexico.
Jul 2 1961
In the tile-covered foyer of his home in Ketchum, Idaho, novelist Ernest Hemingway commits suicide with his favorite shotgun. When the body was later found, "only his chin, mouth, and vestigial scraps of his cheeks were still connected to his body."
Jul 2 1982
UC Berkeley electrical engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos picks up an unattended package in Cory Hall. The pipe bomb hidden inside the parcel explodes, shredding the man's right hand. Coincidentally, Angelakos is present three years later, when the Unabomber claims a second victim in the computer science department, John Hauser.
Jul 2 1982
Vietnam vet Larry Walters climbs aboard an aluminum lawn chair in Southern California, equipped with 42 weather balloons, a CB radio, a parachute, and a pellet gun. During his two-hour voyage from San Pedro to Long Beach, Walters reaches an altitude of 16,000 feet and eventually becomes tangled in some power lines. Walters survives, but receives a $1,500 fine from the FAA.
Jul 2 1990
In Mecca, 1,426 Muslim pilgrims are suffocated and/or crushed to death when panic erupts in an overcrowded pedestrian tunnel. Saudi Arabia opts to bury the victims in a mass grave.
Jul 2 1994
Colombian soccer star Andres Escobar is shot twelve times outside a bar in Bogota, and dies on the spot. Only ten days prior, Escobar had inadvertently scored a goal for the American team in the 1994 World Cup playoffs, resulting in a first-round elimination for Colombia.
Jul 2 1997
The Russian minister of Justice, Valentin Kovalyov, is fired after grainy black-and-white photos of him appear in the tabloid Sovershenno Sekretno. The government official had been secretly filmed in a nightclub sauna with a bevy of young women. No one was wearing clothes.
Jul 2 1998
The eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which has burned continuously since 1921 to commemorate the dead of World War I, is extinguished by an intoxicated soccer fan with his beer-enriched urine. Mexican national Rodrigo Rafael Ortega is arrested and charged with public drunkenness and offending the dead.
Jul 2 1999
Former U.S. Treasury undersecretary Ron Noble, the man who oversaw his department's inquiry into the Waco siege, is chosen to lead Interpol.
|
Free Forum Hosting
Important Announcement
Prev Message
