People Are Sharing The Times They Almost Killed Someone, And Wow, These People Are Lucky They Didn't
Plenty of people talk about their near-death experiences...but what about near-murder experiences? Well, Reddit user BBQPancake recently asked, "What was the closest you've gotten to killing someone?" and the answers were WILD.
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Here are 28 stories where people almost ended up accidentally killing someone that range from so, so dumb to genuinely bone-chilling.
NOTE: There are mentions of violence and a brief mention of sexual assault.
1."Chlorosulfonic acid. At university, I misread the instructions on decomposing it and poured the remainder into a beaker of water. ClSO3H + H2O → H2SO4 + HCl. For the non-science types — it reacted REALLY violently with the water and formed hydrochloric acid and sulphuric acid both as a gas that started to float around the lab. Some people started coughing blood as the acids attacked their respiratory systems."
"Needless to say, I was not allowed to use that in the lab again."
2."I was in fifth grade during this. My mom rented an apartment from one of her coworkers at a club she worked at. When we were moving stuff into the apartment, my mom hurt her back really badly. ... She had to take off work for three days. Her coworker was upset because she didn't get her money from my mom, even though my mom was planning on giving her the money when she went back to work. But the coworker decided she didn't want to wait two days so she decided to come to the apartment to get the money."
"When she knocked on the door, I told my mom someone was there, and she said to ignore it, mostly because we were in a really bad area at the time. The coworker's boyfriend started kicking the door, so I was scared for me, my two younger brothers, and my mom. ... The kitchen was the first room near the door, so naturally, I grabbed a knife and hid behind the fridge, ready to stab whoever was trying to break in. I didn't go through with it when I realized it was my mom's coworker and her boyfriend, but it was still terrifying."
3."I was fermenting home-made kombucha in a tightly closed bottles. Which I forgot to burp. One day, a bottle exploded while my mother-in-law was in the kitchen. Luckily, she was far from the bottle at the moment, and got only a scratch on her hand, but we had to dislodge glass shards from the walls. I still shudder from a thought of what would happen if she were closer."
4."I was in the US Air Force. One day, a fighter jet from an unfriendly foreign power landed on the base I was assigned. I was one of only two armed personnel able to initially respond. We drove a pickup truck onto the taxiway and blocked the plane. My supervisor attempted to signal the pilot to 'cut engines.' The pilot either didn't understand or ignored him. He continued to taxi the aircraft toward us. My supervisor ordered me to fire my rifle into the intakes of the aircraft if he proceeded any further. The pilot did continue toward us. I made a show of charging my M16 rifle and aimed at his intake. Fortunately for all of us, he understood THAT command. He cut engines and raised his canopy."
5."11:30 p.m. Remote country road with no streetlights. There’s a tiny traffic island in the middle of the road, and I see what looks like a slightly different colored silhouette standing there. By all rights I should not have seen him there, but something in my brain clicked and swore there was a figure standing there so I slammed on my brakes as the figure jumped out in front of me. [My] car stopped about two meters away. He smiled really sinisterly and started walking toward the car. I reversed and made to move around him slowly and he jumped in front again. I managed to drive on the wrong side of the road to escape him."
"A minute down the road, I stop to flash my lights at every passing car to warn them, and I shit you not, the second car that passed was a cop, and I explained what happened. I circled back a minute later and saw the dude on the side of the road in cuffs. Totally weird experience."
6."High school friend's dad wanted to teach us how to shoot. Went to the range, and when he wasn't looking, I grabbed the pistol and tried the John Woo sideways grip shot. It flew out of my hand, and the bullet ricocheted off the side wall. That was my last time to ever fire a gun."
7."Years ago, my dad had a .22 rifle. He kept it under the mattress in our pop-up camper on some land we owned in the country. One morning, he and our mom went fishing, and left my brother and me behind. I pulled out the rifle, and started playing with it. My brother got anxious and told me to stop. Instead, I went on to show him how the bolt slid back and then snapped forward. He said be careful, you might load it. I told him there's no bullets in it, see...no magazine. Dad had the six round internal mag loaded. I'd just chambered a round. I kept playing with it, pointing it at my brother, taking a bead right between his eyes. I slid the safety off. I kept teasing him, dancing on the trigger. He got more and more scared, and started crying. I relented. Said I'd stop and to prove he had nothing to worry about, pointed the rifle straight up and said, 'look...' and pulled the trigger."
"I shot a hole through the roof of the camper.
I looked at my brother, dropped the rifle, went outside, and puked.
It's true what they say about your brain and trauma. I don't remember much after that except dad did find out and patched the hole.
I struggled with that memory for a very, very long time afterwards."
8."[I was] hunting at night with my best friend as a young teenager on a farm. The farmer was paying us for pest control as various nocturnal animals were contaminating the cattle feed and causing other problems. We had one scoped rifle and one flashlight and took turns. We snuck up to a feed storage bunker in darkness, and my friend clicked on the flashlight. I raised the rifle and looked down the scope, identifying a target, the same second I was about to fire, my friend misstepped on a rock. The back of his head suddenly took up the entire view of my rifle scope while I already had started putting pressure on the trigger to fire. It was so close, I shake thinking about it decades later."
9."When I passed my driving test many years ago, I asked the instructor if he had any advice for a new driver. He warned me that if I ever saw a ball roll into the street to immediately hit the brakes because there's a good chance a kid will follow. I never forgot that and have religiously followed it ever since. A couple of years ago, I was driving down a residential street, and it happened again, and something in my mind told me to SLAM on my brakes, and so I did. I came to a stop just feet from a really little kid who was completely frozen in terror."
"That driving instructor is probably dead of old age by now, but wherever he is, I hope he understands that he saved that little kid's life and saved me a lifetime of guilt and heartache."
10."High school. Dude said he was going to sexually assault my sister. We fought, he fell and slammed his head on a urinal. Thought for sure I was doing 20, and I kinda grew up in that moment. Haven’t fought a soul since."
"Last I heard of him, he was in prison. I don’t know why, but I kinda wonder about him from time to time. What I did wasn’t acceptable by any means, but he was the kind of person that it was believable, and I couldn’t imagine letting that happen to my sister. He’s locked away for a long time now. Got caught with a bunch of heroin and an illegal firearm, and I saw a Facebook post with a picture of him, and he had a big ass 88 tat. I think he got it after the first time he got picked up for selling to a cop."
11."When I was a wee lad, I was playing in my garage with a neighbor kid, and he was messing with the karaoke machine. Back then in 1995-ish, those machines were freaking huge. It fell over after he pulled on the cord, and the corner dug right into his skull. He was instantly unconscious and bleeding very heavily. I was a small child, so I was pretty stunned, so I sat there watching for a bit. A nearby pillow was SOAKED with blood by the time I got up and ran to get help. He made it out alive, but if I had sat there for longer, he probably wouldn't."
12."One day I went to one of my favorite bars. ... As I’m sitting there, this dude who is significantly taller than me (but maybe a similar weight) came over and sat by me and started to tell me about how fucked up his life was. He told me about his wife leaving him, how he ended up back in bar work, etc. I felt bad so I bought him several shots. I finally got my food and decided to leave. I got into the middle of the parking lot near my car, and then, I felt someone grab my by my neck and put me into a triangle chokehold."
"I started to panic and felt like I was fucked. All I could see was stars as he kicked me in the back of my kneecaps and forced me to my knees. As I started to literally black out, for whatever reason, he took his leverage arm and started hitting me in the head. I somehow managed to wrestle his hands from around my neck at that point, and I was able to square up with him, ready for a fight. He then threw the biggest most obnoxious hook I have ever seen. I used to be an amateur boxer as a teen and early twenty-something, so I immediately recognized his mistake. ... I ducked under it and delivered the most square and perfect hook onto his face. He dropped immediately, and on his way down, he happened to smash his head on a concrete parking block. He fucking planked right into a solid parking block. ... A server came out and checked on him, and said, 'He’s not breathing.' My heart skipped a beat, and I ran as fast as I ever had. I texted my sister and told her I was probably going to prison for a while and told her Ioved her. Then, when I got to work the next day, the headline on the local news was about how some dude (on the same street I had been) had killed a dude in a street fight, and cops were looking for him. I didn’t go to work for a week and thought I was fucked. Turns out I just shattered his nose. ... Someone died on the street on the same day, but it was about two-ish miles up the road."
13."My father had a breathing attack. ... He paled. He was dying in my room. I considered just leaving him like that; he's an awful person. ... I considered not doing CPR. ... The police wouldn't know I didn't give it my all, my mom wouldn't know I wasn't just ignoring the advice. Anyway, I bruised his ribs [in giving CPR], and he still yells to this day."
14."I was working on a garbage truck, and we were winching up a dumpster full of cardboard. The cardboard wouldn’t come out, and he stuck his body through the one foot gap between the dumpster and the truck to reach in there and try and knock it loose. At the same time, I went for the lift controls and rock in and try and knock it loose that way. I should have seen him in there, but went for the controls without looking."
"Didn’t get injured because he reacted as soon as he heard the winch, but if he’d been shifting weight wrong at that moment, it would have been messy."
15."Was working at a grocery store with a wooden garage door in the back. It was a very heavy, very solid door. We started goofing around, showing how strong we are at lifting it. My turn came, and I heaved it up hard, like when you watch The Price Is Right and someone spins the hell out of the wheel. What I didn’t know was that there was no stops at the ends of the metal railings. So, once the garage door reached the top it kept going. Two solid wood panels came off the tracks and swung down within two inches of my coworker's skull."
16."I woke up once at 3 a.m. to some thudding noise and my dogs barking. Walked into the living room and saw someone crawling through my front porch window. I was scared because I figured when I turned a light on, the intruder would run, but they didn’t. I turned around, grabbed the biggest steak knife in my kitchen and run to the window to start stabbing the intruder. Right before I brought the knife down, my mom peaked her head out from behind the curtains. My heart was racing; she was terrified, too. I guess she had lost her house key, and instead of knocking or saying anything when I started turning the lights on, she just kept crawling through."
17."I had an old heavy work van in the '90s, and it was overloaded with tools. Some asshat must have missed his turn and slammed on the brakes in front of me. About a half ton of tools went flying, but thankfully, they hit the steel guards behind the seats. But the van did not want to stop, and I came about one inch from plowing into the guy's bumper. I took some tools out that day."
18."Pneumatic potato cannon. My friends and I were shooting it in my back yard. Must have launched off dozens of potatoes at this point. We decided to stuff three potatoes in the barrel. When we open the valve to shoot it, nothing happened. We were sitting around 60 psi and no launch. The potatoes were stuck. My friend went to look down the barrel. I saw what was going to happen and lifted the back forcing the barrel into the ground. At that time, the potatoes shot out and left a small crater in the ground."
19."My friend bought a bow. We would go to the field behind his house, and we would shoot an arrow straight up into the air and would all have to scatter to avoid getting hit. We also played a game of chicken by loosing arrows at each other but weak enough that they would just fall short of hitting us. I think that every other parallel universe version of me died in that field, and I am the only one left across all possible timelines."
20."I was at the grocery store, and someone had zip-tied a shopping cart to my drivers side door. I thought it was very bizarre, figured it was a shitty prank, cut the tie, and drove home. Some old guy followed me home, tweaking out. He was yelling at me to get in his car and just nonsense. He charged at me, and I immediately took him down, because of pure adrenaline…my newborn baby was in the backseat of my car. He hit the concrete pretty hard, and I put the full weight of my body on his clavicle/neck. I used to live near the jail, and there were sheriff’s deputies within earshot…they somehow missed the commotion but came running when I screamed. Dude was turning purple by the time they got there to handle it. I thought for sure I killed him."
21."[I] was on a film set working when an unstable person with a knife approached myself and another crew member. Was forced to take a swing at him with a gobo arm (it's essentially a metal rod with a metal knuckle on the end of it). Swung hard enough that if it connected, [it] would have caved in this dude's temple. [It] just missed, and it came so close [it] must have jolted the guy back to reality, and he took off. So, [the] closest I came to killing someone was about six inches."
22."I used to ski race to a pretty decent standard, and one time when I was maybe 16, I was warming up for a Super G race (one of the faster disciplines). Normally, for these events you get a designated warm up piste, but for some reason, there wasn’t one on this day. Anyway, I’m coming down the slope probably going 60-ish mph, and over to one side, just over a slight ridge, there are three people standing, facing each other with, like, six or seven meters between them. I’m going too fast to go either side so decide to split the gap between them. As I come over this ridge, I see what I would guess was a 2-year-old sliding between the two groups. My skis missed their head by maybe five inches."
23."Driving a loaded truck, probably about 10,000 lbs. or so, at the speed limit. Traffic in oncoming lane at a standstill. Some [censored] decided he was too important to wait with everyone else and pulls out, face to face with me, at very short range. I swerved hard right — didn't really expect to miss him but somehow did. Then swerved hard left to avoid the people on the sidewalk — somehow missed them, too. Didn't think you could make a truck do that. Apparently, my passenger (the owner of the truck I was driving for) didn't think it was possible, either. I learned some new swear words in Spanish, and what sounded like prayer of thanks to Madre de Dios."
24."When I was a small child (maybe, like, 7), my [older] brothers...took me sledding with them. The road we were driving down was covered in packed down snow, so my brothers got the brilliant idea to hang a snowsuit out of the trunk and put the middle child on a snowboard and tow him behind the car. My job was to watch out the window and make sure [our] middle sibling was okay. Well, he hit a patch of road where there was no snow and started to fall, but managed to catch himself. The position he caught himself in, though, left him partially bent over in a way that I couldn’t see him. Rather than ask older brother to stop the car, my 7-year-old self told him to go faster."
"Looking back, that was incredibly dangerous, and we definitely almost killed our brother. No idea why the 24-year-old in this equation did not do anything to stop this, but thankfully, all three of us made it to the sledding spot okay."
25."We were on a holiday in Croatia. Every day we would play waterpolo in the pool of the campsite. The pool was, like, 1.7m deep or something so you could stand. I had the ball in my hand, and a girl was kicking me underwater and scratching my arm open to get the ball (arm was scratched open and bleeding at the end of it). So, I got kinda mad and wanted to get back at her; when she had the ball, I jumped up and pushed with two hands on the shoulder/neck to put her underwater (didn’t wanna drown her but just make it annoying). As I pushed down, she was standing on the floor of the pool. When I pushed down, she kept her feet on the floor of the pool and pushed down as hard as I could. Next thing [I knew], she was screaming, and the ambulance was coming to the campsite."
"Turns out, I twisted her neck and damaged her neck vertebrae. Doctors in the hospital told the parents of this girl that if it got pushed a few millimeters further, she could have got paralyzed for life."
26."When I was in my early 20s, I would drive like a total ass. Speed, pass people where I shouldn’t, etc. One night, I’m driving home around 8 p.m. Home was off a semi-rural two lane 'highway,' and the speed limit there was 55mph. I get stuck behind someone going 45mph. This infuriates my dumb brain, and I’m thinking, 'Fuck it, I’ll just pass him on the shoulder.' I’m about to move onto the shoulder and then decide, 'Eh, I only have, like, a mile 'til my turn off. I’ll just ride it out' and stay behind him. Probably a quarter mile later, there’s a woman and a baby carriage walking on the shoulder. Why she was walking on the shoulder of a highway at night I’ll never know, but I 100% would have killed her and the kid if I had tried to pass that guy. That fucked me up pretty bad, and I changed my driving habits immediately."
27.And finally, let's end on this wild story. "I was 18 years old in a nightclub and saw another man making out with the woman I was in a relationship with and in love with at the time. It popped the cork on years worth of pent up aggression from being relentlessly and horrendously bullied and abused. I snapped and fractured his cheekbone and eye socket and three knuckles on my right hand with one hit. I scrambled with him on the floor for a moment before taking his back and wrapping my arm around his neck from behind. I started squeezing with everything I had in me and whispered into his ear, 'You're going to die here, I'm going to fucking kill you.' I remember thinking to myself, 'What the fuck am I saying?' It was almost an out of body experience for me subconsciously watching myself attempt to kill a man."
"It took four bouncers and three of my friends to claw us apart. I would have murdered him then and there and ruined my entire life had I not been forcefully removed.
What happened next I remember nothing of, I only know what friends of mine had pieced together for me in the aftermath of all this. By the time the cops had pinned me down on the footpath by the door, I was in and out of consciousness every 30 seconds. One minute I'd be screaming some nonsense at the top of my lungs about how I was going to 'kill that German dog.' (He wasn't even German.) And the next minute, I was acting totally fine asking the cops politely if they'd let go of me. The paramedics ended up sedating me, and I found out in the hospital the next morning that one of my drinks had been spiked with a cocktail of drugs including almost lethal levels of GHB and some form of methamphetamine. The combination of the substances, all the abuse I'd put up with in my life, and finally seeing the woman I loved betray me set something off in me that transformed me completely into a murderous animal.
I made the decision to reach out to that dude through friends of mine the very next day to attempt to explain myself and to apologize to him. I made it clear I understood that what I had done to him and put him through was unforgivable and that I'd accept any consequences that came my way because of it but also that it was not something I'd ever consider doing in my normal, functional, and rational state of mind. It took me a long time to forgive myself for what I had done despite the fact that substances were involved, and he ultimately decided not to press charges against me and even accepted my apology which helped me tremendously.
...I still have nightmares every so often about what would have happened if those guys had not separated us. It was absolutely horrific and traumatizing for everyone involved, and in my mind, I am indebted to that man for the life I have. I could have been looking down the barrel of life in prison if he had not been as compassionate as he was. Many life lessons learnt from that time in my life."
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
