Armed robbers got the shock of their lives when a meteorite descended from the sky and killed one of them on the spot.
A burglary ended in a very sudden and unexpected way yesterday, in Orange County, California, when a gang member was killed by a falling meteorite debris while he was holding three people at gunpoint in a Santa Ana residence.
According to World News Daily Report, the criminal, Juan Pedro Sancho Jiménez, had just broken into a house in the Eastside area of Santa Ana, when a meteorite fragment weighting almost ½ pound fell from the sky, pierced through the roof of the residence and hit him on the top of the head.
The well-known gang member who had already spent eleven years in jail for s*xual assault and armed robbery, was killed almost instantly as the meteorite passed through his skull, destroyed his spine and continued its way through many of his vital organs.
Officers from the Orange County Sheriff Department arrived on the site only a few minutes after the incident, but the assailant was already dead.
The victims who were held at gunpoint by Mr. Jiménez at the time of his death, were still shocked went they met the media a few hours later.
"He kicked our front door open and started threatening us with a gun” says Margarita Sanchez, one of the victims. “It's still a mystery to us how it all happened. He was asking for money, and we tried to explain to him that we didn’t have any. I had never been so scared in my life, I thought I was going to die. Then all of a sudden, there was blood everywhere, a hole in the ceiling and the guy was dead. We didn’t understand what had happened until hours later, when the cops explained it to us. The strangest part is that he saved my life, because the meteorite went right through the couch where I usually sit to watch TV.”
Small celestial objects frequently collide with Earth, but most are of small size and land in uninhabited regions. It was estimated in 2005, that the chance of a single person born today of dying due to an meteorite impact is around 1 in 200,000, but Mr. Jiménez is the first human known to have been killed directly by meteor impact.
The first known modern case of a human injured by a space rock occurred on November 30, 1954, in Sylacauga, Alabama. A 4 kg (8.8 lb) stone chondrite crashed through a roof and hit Ann Hodges in her living room after it bounced off her radio. She was badly bruised, but survived.