How to break up a Christmas party
Did a thrown glass shard fell a festive partygoer, or was he stabbed?
Holiday parties can fill people with dread rather than festive glee. Partygoer behaviour can quickly move from celebratory to embarrassing – and in extreme cases, even to the downright criminal.
Twelve years ago in Germany, one Christmas party began with fun among friends and then morphed into a melee.1 During the brawl, a man crashed through a glass table, and shortly afterwards the friend he was fighting lay dead from severe blood loss. Witnesses – possibly intoxicated, reluctant to admit what they saw, or conflicted – provided different versions of events. The surviving fighter claimed that he ‘threw a fragment of the broken glass table in the direction of the other male and hit him in a way so that he collapsed bleeding profusely’. But some witnesses claimed the victim was stabbed with the glass shard. A forensic investigation was needed to find out the truth.
The victim was struck in the right side of the neck by a piece of glass from the broken table. Struck with sufficient energy to pierce flesh, cut through the right sternocleidomastoid muscle, slashing both his jugular vein and subclavian artery, and slicing the pleural dome of his right lung. This fatal wound was approximated to be 10cm long. Could a thrown ‘dagger-shaped glass fragment’ do that?