Carjackers doomed to die in petty theft gone horribly wrong

boing
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God, what a terrible way to die.

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Darwin award… Evolution takes no prisoners.

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I remember something from the late 1980ies or early 1990ies about Cobalt 60 from medical equipment ending up first in a junk yard in Mexico and later in cast iron table legs. They triggered an alarm when the truck transporting them by chance drove past the gates at Los Alamos Laboratories.
You’d think materials like that were secured a little better.
What a nasty way to die, and for what?

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we have a rule on the jobsite: never open the mysterious bucket.

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“Your Geiger counter - never leave home without it!”

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I don’t think the carjackers deserve the terrible fate that awaits them, but stealing a truck usually amounts to more than “petty” theft.

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Since when is stealing a truck petty theft? It’s usually called grand theft auto.

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Seriously, though this is awful. Like that time someone scrapped a medical device, and someone found the shiny blue stuff in the dump, and a whole town got poisoned.

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They also robbed the truck at gunpoint. There’s nothing petty about it.

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Sounds like good words to live by to me :smiley:

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… and never stand in line with the downstream end of a drainpipe.

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Given the difficulty in ascertaining the dose of radiation these guys would have received, is it possible this is a scare tactic designed to get them to seek hospital treatment, where they might be apprehended?

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Given this material, and how we’re told it was found, it’s hard to believe that at least one of them hasn’t received LD100, probably many times over that.

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Karma’s a bitch, eh?

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“The people who handled it will have severe problems with radiation,” he said. “They will, without a doubt, die.”

So, they’re mortal?

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Worst case scenario: One of the dying thieves, in their anguished delirium, bites someone and gives them the proportional strength and super-senses of a truck hijacker.

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As other have pointed out, this was hardly “petty theft”! They stole a special crane-equipped (semi?) truck at gunpoint! Still, seems like a horrible way to die, and I am not without some sympathy for them

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Could have been a lot worse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samut_Prakan_radiation_accident

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“Hey, uh, Joe? What’s this symbol mean?”

“Which one?”

“The big yellow triangle here, with the three black pie slices around the little black circle.”

“Oh that. That’s just government stuff. Whenever you see one’a these trucks with these diamond shapes and this little feller’ or his pals in it, that’s the government ID system and whatnot.”

“But what’s — ‘Radioactive’ — mean?”

“Well dang, ain’t it obvious? Means there’s a radio running inside, that is to say, a radio is active.”

“Shoot! Then we should open this up and turn that radio off, oughtn’t we?”

“I dare say you’ve got the right of it: which if we don’t, the government will know where we took the truck!”

“Could you imagine? How stupid would we look then!”

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