60-year old sportswriter Martin Manley shot himself to death around 5:00 in the morning near a police station in Kansas City last Saturday.
Just before he pulled the trigger, he dialed 911 to report a suicide "at the south end of the parking lot of the Overland Park Police Station at 123rd and Metcalf." It was a .380 pistol that killed him but what's causing the greater stir is how the sportswriter staged everything and uploaded a website dedicated to his life as well as the reasons as to why he decided to take his own life just as he turned 60.
"Let me ask you a question," Manley wrote on his website, which he divided into 34 categories and 44 subcategories. "After you die, you can be remembered by a few-line obituary for one day in a newspaper when you're too old to matter to anyone anyway ... OR you can be remembered for years by a site such as this. That was my choice and I chose the obvious,'" he states in his website.
"The apt analogy is that I've run the race. I already got to the finish line," he states in his blog. "Look, I was (and you are) blips! Literally, nothing more than a blip on the radar screen. We appear in the blink of an eye and then we are gone," he later goes on to write. The sportswriter turned blogger believed in ending his life just at the right time, just at the moment he felt like he already lived a full life, which is why he found it's time to end it.
As for being depressed, the sportswriter claimed he wasn't in his blog. Reports show that he was living alone, had no children, was divorced twice, have parents who are now both dead and two siblings that are far from him and rarely visited. Yahoo!, which Manley prepaid to host his site decided to take the blog down but his sister, Barbie Flick, is fighting to have it restored, saying they should respect her brother's last wishes.
This isn't the first time suicide and the internet met. A Japanese man live streamed his death in 2010, as he had his webcam installed just as he hung himself on a rod. Two years before, a teenager in Florida filmed his drug overdose with his webcam.
Parting words form Martin Manley wrote, "I guarantee you from having imagined my way through it a hundred times, the only thing going through my head was asking forgiveness, remembering those whom I love, being glad I was able to end it the way I wanted and thrilled to death that I left this website," he wrote. "Don't weep for me dying alone. We ALL die alone."
© 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
