Mysterious death -- Authorities eye spontaneous combustion


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SALLISAW, OK ? Sequoyah County authorities say a man who died in a fire at his home may have spontaneously combusted.

The 66-year-old man died in the blaze on Monday.

Sequoyah County Sheriff Ron Lockhart says several neighbors entered the home when they saw smoke and assumed trash had caught fire. Then they realized a person was burning.

Lockhart said the remains were in the kitchen and there was no other damage in the home. The sheriff says there was no apparent source of the fire.

Authorities say the man had a history of heavy drinking and smoking.

No cause of the fire has been determined and Lockhart says spontaneous combustion has not been ruled out.

The body was sent to the state Medical Examiner's Office in Tulsa for an autopsy.

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I like how their first thought isn't "a cigarette that got out of control when he was drunk" but "zomg spontaneous combustion". O_o

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I like how their first thought isn't "a cigarette that got out of control when he was drunk" but "zomg spontaneous combustion". O_o

You don't watch enough hollywood imo.

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I like how their first thought isn't "a cigarette that got out of control when he was drunk" but "zomg spontaneous combustion". O_o

That's much too logical, better to just say he caught on fire for no reason what so ever.

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In fairness you'd have to soak yourself in pure alcohol to get any significant burning to the body.

A spilled beer or a few sips of whiskey isn't going to incinerate someone.

Once a drink is inside the body, it becomes diluted.

And a dropped cigarette, isn't going to nearly completely destroy a body, and touch nothing else in the room.

If you actually research SHC, you would see how severely cremated some people were, with no explainable source.

The sheriff says there was no apparent source of the fire.
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Fire marshals are trained to identify when an accelerant is used. Spontaneous combustion is weird and would seem like a scapegoat, but there may simply be something else at work here to cause what we consider "spontaneous". There are so few cases documented, and once someone does combust, it's probably too late to study them.

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Human fat burns really well. So you have a person, getting ###### and smoking a cigarette. He passes out, cigarette falls on his shirt, sets it on fire, burns through skin, catches his fat on fire, he quickly goes up in smoke (literally).

Yay, I'm smarter than Sallisaw OK police dept.

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^ That's been disproved, long ago.

A dropped cigarette is not going to burn you to ashes.

If it were so easy, murderers would have been doing it for centuries.

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