John Edward Jones wasn’t any prominent politician, discoverer of a new chemical element, or the first man to land on the moon.
He was a simple man (a medical student, married, with one daughter and a son on his way), who nevertheless entered into the pages of history for one reason: his love for spelunking and the tragic death that it brought him.
On November 24th, 2009 (two days before Thanksgiving), John and his brother Josh, along with nine other friends and relatives, decided to explore the Nutty Putty Cave as a bonding activity to get closer to each other, in the spirit of the festivities.
Little did they know that John, in exploring one of the narrowest canals of the cave, would get himself into a situation that he would not be able to escape: tightly jammed into the canal, upside down, and unable to breathe.
There he would spend 28 hours before dying of suffocation on November 25th.
Here we explore ten facts about his death as, definitively, one of the most horrible ways to die.
10 /10 He Thought He Was Getting Into A Different Canal
One of the first questions that his loved ones asked was: how could John have gotten himself into such a position? He was an experienced spelunker, who had already been to the Nutty Putty cave several times as a child, a teenager.
The answer was only revealed later when the people who were with him explained that John mistakenly thought that he was getting into a famous passage, called the Birth Canal, for apparent reasons.
The entrance for this passage was not signalized, so only after being entirely trapped within the wrong one, he realized the grave mistake that he had made.
9 /10 He Jammed Himself More Trying To Get Out
When he noticed this, his first reaction (and indeed the first reaction of most people) was to try and squeeze himself out of the natural duct by wiggling around.
Thinking that he could not wiggle back by his means, he tried to press forward, exhaling all the air in his chest to pass through the 10×18-inch space finally.
This proved to be worse; now, he was stuck even tighter and unable to expand his chest fully. And things didn’t improve when his brother Josh tried to pull him out, sliding him further down the hole in the process.