“Gun Death” Suicide

Two “Gun Death?” stories for today. This one is a local one that’s all over the news.

An elderly woman’s possible suicide by cyanide prompted an emergency hazmat response in Brighton yesterday and a police investigation into how the woman died and where the poison came from.

The woman’s husband told police he came home yesterday to find his wife dead next to a bottle of powdered potassium cyanide.

Why would anybody have cyanide, you can’t hunt with it….well…

Another way that divers catch coral reef fish is with cyanide. Cyanide is a poison. The divers pour this poison on the reef, which stuns the fish and kills the coral. Then they rip open the reef with crowbars and catch the fish while they are too sick from the poison to swim away.

OK but how did this woman get the poison?

A police source said the woman could have had access to the toxin through her employment at a local medical facility.

She worked in Cancer research. Cellular biology really isn’t my thing, but cyanide radicals are very useful when researching cellular respiration and apoptosis, its actually pretty easy stuff to come by in any place that works with cells.

Yeah but she didn’t use a gun. If a gun had been used other mights have been hurt.

The woman’s death set off a Level-3 hazmat response that resulted in the precautionary decontamination of the husband, three cops, four firefighters, four paramedics and two civilians, as well as the temporary shutdown of St. Elizabeth’s emergency room, MacDonald said.

In addition, Boston EMS had two of its ambulances towed to be decontaminated, and Clean Harbors was brought in to do a thorough scrubbing of the condo unit.

Ever heard of a self-inflicted gunshot wound causing that much mayhem?