Almanac for January 5th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 5: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-5th-E1E6Z4SMT

Bummer January 5th

January 5, 1971: Geraldine Liston, the wife of professional boxer Sonny Liston, arrives at the couple’s home in Las Vegas upon returning from a 2-week trip. She finds her husband’s dead body upstairs in their bedroom beside a broken bench, slumped over the bed. She initially believes he may have tripped on the bench and fallen, giving himself a fatal a head wound. However, his official cause of death is listed as lung congestion and heart failure. Liston was known to have complained of chest pains in December 1970. Yet the Las Vegas publicly stated that Liston’s death was from heroin overdose. 

A small amount of heroin is found in the house, but no needles or other drug paraphernalia indicate that Liston used heroin before his death. The death remains somewhat mysterious due to the police comments and the fact that Liston is thought to have died approximately six days before his body is discovered, leaving the body too decomposed to do much conclusive testing.

January 5, 1988: Retired NBA player “Pistol Pete” Maravich collapses and dies at the age of 40 after playing in a church pickup basketball game in Pasadena, California, where the other players  include Evangelical Christian author/Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. Maravich’s autopsy reveals a rare congenital heart defect that had gone undetected until his sudden death.

January 5, 1998: Former musician and then-politician Sonny Bono dies following an accident in which he skies into a tree.

January 5, 2002: 15-year-old high school student Charles J. Bishop steals a Cessna 172 while his flight instruction is performing a routine inspection on the exterior of the aircraft. Bishop flies the plane into a 42-story Bank of America building without any apparent attempt to stop. Bishop is killed; no one else is injured.

January 5, 2015: Danish martial artist/model/actor Khan Bonfils is rehearsing for a London stage production of Dante’s Inferno when he collapses suddenly. Paramedics are unable to revive him, and the 42-year-old is pronounced dead at the scene.

January 5, 2022: 29-year-old Thomas Anthony Mansfield dies after mis-measuring and consuming caffeine powder equivalent to the caffeine in 200 cups of coffee. He calls paramedics because of an irregular heartbeat, but they’re unable to save him.

 Dante Alighieri's portrait by Sandro Botticelli. Public domain.

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