'Hold your wee for a Wii' audio recording
Audio recordings are now available of the radio station sponsored water drinking contest for a Wii, which caused the death of a woman due to water intoxication. Jennifer Strange, 28, died after drinking over two gallons of water in Sacramento radio station 107.9 The End's "Hold your wee for a Wii" contest. The clips above are highlights of the best-of-the-worst moments when 20/20 hindsight is applied.
Caller: "I want to say that, um, that those people that are drinking all that water can get sick and possibly die of water intoxication."
DJ 1: "Yeah, we're aware of that."
DJ 2:"They signed releases, so we're not responsible. It's OK."
After some more witty banter about people dying, they figure they're golden as long as they, "MAKE SURE SHE SIGNS THE RELEASE!"
The attorney retained by the Strange family looks to be going after everyone involved in the contest, even possibly Nintendo, to get one hefty, hefty, hefty pay day. After listening to that audio, we can't imagine how any jury is going to let those involved in this contest go without making a sizable contribution to Strange's three children's college fund.
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(Page 1) Reader Comments
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"Consuming as little as 0.48 gal in a single sitting may prove fatal for a person adhering to a low-sodium diet, or 3 litres 0.79 gallons for a person on a normal diet."
If i was a radio DJ, it took me two seconds just now to see how fatal 2 gallons could be.
Wow.
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Hold your Wii for a Wii with Gatorade! Death will be caused by exploded kidneys!
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Even if the disclaimer attempted to excuse the radio station and the Djs of liability it will not hold up in court. You can not attempt to limit or excuse liability for personal injury or death where the party imposing the clause has acted negligently.
Also in terms of a criminal case, you can not write a disclaimer that attempts to allow you to break the law. Thats common sense. Or else there would be no legal problem when it comes to euthanasia, you could just have the patient sign a disclaimer saying they allow you to murder them.
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If we assume that neither the contestants nor the radio realized the risk, then the radio station should have taken the advice of the nurse that called them and warned them of the danger. Instead they turned it into a big joke and now someone is dead.
The least they could have done is paid attention to the warning signs and got the contestant some medical attention.
All of you people talking about natural selection, you better watch out. Based on the intellect shown in your comments, if natural selection is truly at work we won't be hearing much else from you in the future.
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Its not hard to look this shit up. The whole idea is deadly.
Having someone drink 2 gallons of water and hold their pee as long as they can is equivalent to serving cyanide.
That woman didn't sign a release, she signed a death warrant. Its awful, she obviously didn't understand what was happening to her.
Criminal charges should ABSOLUTELY be filed.
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Something is very wrong with all of you.
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Throwing up wouldn't do you any good anyway, since your sodium levels would be really low. If there was natural selection those DJ's should be dead not the woman. I bet the woman trusted that a radio station would do research before doing such contests -_-'
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This woman kept drinking, even though she experienced pain, light-headedness, and distention, only because she didn't want to wait upwards of a month for a console that she most likely knew almost nothing about. She wasted her life to be impatient.
The DJ's were irresponsible, also. Ignoring callers who pleaded them to stop. Callers who knew that this was very dangerous. So what, there's a release? You're not going to intentionally endanger someone's LIFE simply because they signed a release, are you? When you hear that what you're doing can cause death, you stop.
Listening to them made me kind of sick, and this is the first time in a while that I've actually taken the time to respond on a Joystiq topic.
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quote "Strange was the runner-up in the contest that required drinking huge amounts of water in a short amount of time.
Contest winner Lucy Davidson recalled how she and Strange both got ill after the contest.
"After it was all over ... we both went into the bathroom and we were both sick," Davidson said. "She's throwing up. I'm throwing up. I mean, we just had too much."
Davidson recovered from her illness. Strange was found dead at her Rancho Cordova home Friday afternoon."
So why didnt the winner die???
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Because not every human being is exactly the same?
munn75 has had by far the smartest comment here so far. I second everything he said.
btw, I notice that the stars have been turned off and we've now got an Engadget-style password system here... (which would be an improvement if I didn't have to uncheck that "email me" box every friggin time)
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He must feel like crap.
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Shame she had kids, her gene pool is still out there polluting our society.
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I thought since you can't reply to a comment on this site, you wouldn't get an e-mail anyway? Maybe other blogs hosted on the same company that hosts Joystiq do have some sort of way to reply to a specific comment, but much like the password thing was mentioned in the e-mails but was non-existant, the "E-mail me ~blahblah~" checkbox is only there because of the way the site is coded?
Maybe I got it all wrong though.
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Response 1: She knew what she was getting into.
No, no she didn't. How many people actually know how much water it takes to kill you? You people going "she should have known better," did you know? Would you have entered that contest?
Response 2: Darwinian Theory.
No. Just, no. There's a special place in hell for people like you, where they put the child molesters and people who talk at the theater.
Conclusion:
Someone's going to jail, and now instead of mocking the risks of a potentialy hazardous contest, they can mockingly narrate their own anal rape.
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Anyone that got a public education knows that Water is not some magical elixir that you can drink infinite amounts of, and can cure everything. You should had learned from biology class that too much of anything is bad for you.
She should had weighted the risks vs the rewards, and came up with the decision that he life is not worth a toy (gaming system). She should had known that even if she survived the consumption of so much water, she risked permanent damage to digestive/urinary tracks that could had still resulted in death.
Yes, it was a sad thing to do. Yes, the radio station and the DJs should pay. No, blame still needs to be placed on the victim for negligence.
Ignorance is not an excuse.
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You actually think that the fact you can die from drinking water is common knowledge? I don't recall a single instance in the entirety of my education learning that you could die from water intoxication. No, I learned it by overhearing another person's conversation.
Yeah, there are isolated reports in the news, but do you think people take that in given all the other news, or that they even check the news at all? Was it a smart thing to do? No.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that common sense isn't common, and just because someone isn't supremely educated doesn't mean that they had it coming.
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Which comes back to my comment "Ignorance is not an excuse". I am not trying to be some heartless bastard, but damn, everyone at one time consumed too much water before at one time in their life and gotten sick. Once I drunk 3 16 ounce glasses of water, downed them quickly, and had the sensation to vomit, and I never did that before.
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I guess I just really object to people saying anything remotely like "she had it coming" because while she was ignorant, the radio station was not. To me, the blame lies solely on the station.
As for your "everyone's done it" thing, I haven't, and I know quite a few people that haven't. Your "everyone's done it" thing just doesn't work, unfortunately.
I just don't see the logic in placing blame on her. It may have been her choice, but she didn't know, and the people that at least had some idea didn't inform her of the risks, mostly because they didn't know themselves, which all equates to one huge mistake by a radio station that may cost them quite a bit more than a few jobs and money.
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consequences of what can happen, they continue on foolishly. Her three orphan kids didn't sign a release for their mother's death. And they said "It's OK".
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Or not. You can't put all blame on one side of the fence. No, it's not common knowledge that water can kill you. The woman didn't know that, but the hosts clearly aren't bastions of wisdom either. Negligence is attributed to both sides.
And yes, the comments made by the hosts are deplorable, but only with hindsight. Their job is to wake up every morning and be jackasses on public radio. That's what they think about when they drink their morning coffee. And if a concerned caller phones in, they need to maintain their radio personas.
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It is NOT common knowledge that water can kill you, and how will common sense tell you that water can kill you? Water is commonly known as a harmless substance, isn't it?
And no, I've never drunk too much water and gotten sick, that's a stupid assumption.
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I'm sorry that you have to flat out lie to get your point across, but most people have done similar things.
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It is NOT common knowledge that water can kill you, and how will common sense tell you that water can kill you? Water is commonly known as a harmless substance, isn't it?"
I'm sorry that you think that water is completely harmless, but anyone that use critical thinking can deduct that anything has the potential to kill you.
"And no, I've never drunk too much water and gotten sick, that's a stupid assumption."
You never had the sensation of being ill after drinking too much water? Or are you just lying?
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Maybe I've never drank too much water? I don't see why assume that everyone has drank too much water, let alone felt sick after doing it.
And I said COMMONLY KNOWN AS HARMLESS, not that *I* thought it was harmless. And what do you mean ANYTHING has the potential to kill you? Can my bed kill me? lol
Assuming you mean putting substances in your body, you could deduct that drinking lots of water could kill you, but only at high numbers at which point your bladder would burst. 1.8 liters isn't that much, yet it's enough to kill someone on a low-sodium diet. There is no way of deducting that drinking water causes sodium levels to overdilute in the blood plasma without RESEARCH.
Long story short, you are a dick that pulls every argument out of his ass, and I hope you don't have kids before you die, so no one can suffer from your genes.
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How do you know it's common knowledge?
Oops, you don't, you just pulled that out of your ass, GTFO.
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