18. Fell into a manhole and was steamed to death.
Around Christmas 2002, bartender Doyle went out drinking with pal Michael Wright and Wright’s girlfriend. As they all walked home, Wright thought Doyle was hitting on his girlfriend, and witnesses later told cops they saw a man getting ‘the s–t beat out of him.’ He was heard screaming, ‘No, don’t break my legs!’ and another witness said he saw someone throw Doyle down an open manhole.
The drop was 18 feet. At the bottom was a pool of boiling water, from a broken main. Doyle didn’t die instantly — in fact, as first responders arrived, he was standing below, reaching up and screaming for help. No paramedic or firefighter could climb down to help — it was, a Con Ed supervisor said, 300 degrees in the steam tunnel.
Four hours later, Sean Doyle’s body was finally recovered. Its temperature was 125 degrees — the medical examiners thought it was likely way higher, but thermometers don’t read any higher than that.
When Melinek (the NYC Medical Examiner) saw the body on her autopsy table, she writes, she thought he’d ‘been steamed like a lobster.’ His entire outer layer of skin had peeled off, and his internal organs were literally cooked.
He otherwise had no broken bones and no head trauma, which meant he was fully conscious as he boiled to death.
‘The worst nightmares I ever had in my two years at OCME,’ Melinek writes, ‘came after I performed the postmortem examination of Sean Doyle.’”
