The Most Ironic Deaths of All Time (Vol. 2)

Some things are just not smart to do, like taunting an alligator, for instance — especially an 11-foot-long one. Jumping in the water with an alligator is also not a good idea. But jumping in the water with an 11-foot-long alligator after taunting it is an even worse idea.

According to the Daily Mail, 28-year-old Tommie Woodward, a man known for wearing straw cowboy hats and a T-shirt reading "Class Motherf*cker," was slain by an alligator in the Texas bayou after shouting "F*ck the alligators!" and jumping into the water with the aforementioned carnivorous reptile.

According to a witness on the scene, "I saw his body floating face down, and then he's up there for a couple seconds and then he gets dragged back down and pulled off."

On August 16, 2014, just as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was at the height of its virality, it's co-founder, 27-year-old Corey Griffin, drowned in an unrelated diving accident off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Griffin helped co-found the viral craze that involves dumping ice water over your head and plastering it all over social media to help raise donations to fight Lou Gehrig's Disease. He came up with the idea after his friend Pete Frates was diagnosed with it.

Aspiring rapper Ervin McKinness, known as Jew'elz and Inkyy in the music community that had recently awarded him a recording deal, never got a chance to make any music professionally because 21 minutes after he said “f**k it” to driving drunk, the SUV he was in skidded into a wall and killed all five of the car’s occupants, including the would-be rapper.

Derek Kieper was an honors student, a friend, and most notably, an anti-seatbelt rebel.

Kieper described himself as being part of “a die-hard group of non-wearers out there who simply do not wish to buckle up no matter what the government does.” So staunch was he that the government shouldn’t have any say in the safety precautions folks take while in motor vehicles, he took to the pages of the Daily Nebraskan a mere three months prior to his passing, to extol his position to the readers of the paper.

Practicing his unwavering allegiance to keeping his seatbelt holstered, Kieper and two of his seatbelt-wearing frat brothers were returning from a trip to San Antonio, Texas, when the SUV they were traveling in hit an icy patch and flew off the road before rolling over several times in a roadside ditch. Both the driver and the front-seat passenger survived the crash with non-life threatening injuries while Kieper, who was ejected from the car when it careened off the highway, perished on impact.

The incident transpired when Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old mother of three, took place in radio station KDND’s “Hold your wee for a Wii” contest. The winner would be the contestant who could drink the most water without breaking for a pee. Other participants speculated, after the game had ended, that Strange and some of the others participating in the contest had drunk upwards of two gallons of water in their efforts to win a $250 game box.

Far from being ignorant of the potential for harm involved in drinking that much water, several incidents of water poisoning were referenced on the air while the game was underway, and a nurse even called the radio show to warn that the contestants could face health risks if they continued. 

But Strange soldiered on and even went to work after the contest ended, eventually heading home in tremendous pain later in the day. Her mother found her corpse in her home shortly thereafter.

Strange came in second in the contest and did not win the Wii.

62-year-old opera veteran Richard Versalle was beginning to sing in the premiere of The Makropulos Case at the Lincoln Center in New York City when he basically told the audience he was about to perish. Well, not Versalle so much as his character (a clerk) who was standing on a ladder, fetching a file from a cabinet. After singing the line “you can only live so long,” he had a heart attack and fell 15 feet to the stage below.

The performance halted and the house doctor declared Versalle deceased.