Suicide Balloons
Mike Smith
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In New Mexico, a state known for its balloons and not without its violence, it should not be too surprising that someone has managed to combine the two.
In March of 2008, fifty-five-year-old Thomas Hickman of North Richland Hills, Texas, drove his Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo west into New Mexico, until his vehicle ran out of gas and sputtered to a halt just southeast of the town of Santa Rosa.
There, it seems this West Texas Director of Operations for the fast-food seafood chain Red Lobster walked out into a desert field carrying a handgun, a Smith & Wesson Airweight, that had been partially filed down so as to weigh as little as possible. He filled a number of white helium-filled balloons, tied the balloons to the gun, covered his mouth with duct tape, and fatally shot himself in the back of the head.
Investigators have since found that Hickman’s life insurance policy would pay Hickman’s wife $388,000 upon his death, or twice that if his death was deemed an accident.
It seems that Hickman had intended for the gun to float away after his suicide, making his death appear to be a murder—which it could have been a part of as well, if the gun had floated over to, say, the home of a family with small children—but instead the weapon proved too heavy for the attached balloons and quickly became entangled in a group of nearby cactus plants and bushes.
So that didn’t work out.
And what’s worse is that even before the story recently went public—in the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, among other papers—a lot of people began talking about how similar it all seemed to an episode of the popular forensics show “CSI.” His plan hadn’t worked—and it wasn’t even original.
Still, it’s strange. And sad. A guy’s friends have lost their buddy. A wife has lost her husband. A son has lost his father. And a man, for whatever reason, has given up his life.
As depressing as suicide can be, even a weird one like this, it’s almost never as depressing of an act to imagine as it is to imagine just how terrible the victim/perpetrator must have felt right before ending his life. This guy had really thought this out—filing down the gun, buying the helium, buying the balloons, driving out into the desert—and it would seem he had basically put a price on his life of $388,000 to $776,000, deciding his family would rather have that money than have him, deciding that that was worth more to them than he was.
This was a project, not an impulse, a planned event, not a spur-of-the-moment action, and that this man's self-loathing or indifference to his own existence could persist throughout the undertaking’s entire duration, that he would work so hard just to end his own self, is...well, the word for what it is certainly isn’t a cheerful one.
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