FOXSYLVANIA

– – We would advise you, good readers, not to be eating anything while reading the following post.  Having given that warning, we now will reveal the sad but true tale of a West Palm Beach Florida man who choked to death in October after eating dozens of live cockroaches in a contest staged as as a promotional event by a pet store in Deerfield Beach to win an ivory ball python.- -I swear that I am not making this up!

Now you’re probably wondering who wouldn’t want in on a contest to win a python by eating live roaches, and fully thirty competitors did.  So enthusiastically did one 32-year-old guy launch himself into this competition eating 26 mostly discoid roaches that his airway became obstructed with “arthropod body parts,” and he essentially choked to death on the bizarre meal.  The Broward County medical examiner’s office found that the contestant died of “asphyxia due to choking and aspiration of gastric contents.”

The owner of the pet store was named Ben Siegel, who bore no relationship to the infamous Ben Siegel, the American gangster involved in the development of Las Vegas who bore the nickname, Bugsy…

This entry was posted on November 27, 2012 at 2:19 am and is filed under events involving animals, strange happenings, things humans do, weird. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: roach-eating contests, roaches