Police say a Pittsburgh man died from suicide after disconnecting his home’s gas line to allow his house to fill up with gas and rigging it to explode — an incident that took place on his daughter’s wedding day.
As Daily Mail reported, the incident took place on Saturday afternoon in the town of Edgewood, Pennsylvania, which borders the city of Pittsburgh. Police said that the man’s home was blown apart by an explosion, and that the man could be seen outside the home shortly before the explosion. It took emergency services several hours to recover the man’s body, the report noted.
Afterward, police said it appeared that the man rigged the house to explode in order to take his life.
“This gentleman apparently had some personal issues and we’ve had information from neighbors that would indicate that there’s a great potential here that he would have blown the house up,” Edgewood Police Chief Robert Payne said on Saturday, via KDKA .
Payne added that it appears the man disconnected the gas line into his basement and allowed the home to fill up with gas. Though Payne did not say exactly how the man triggered the explosion, he said it would have only taken a spark to explode the home. There were no issues with the gas line prior to the explosion, police added.
Witnesses said the man’s family was gone from the home, attending his daughter’s wedding. Neighbors who saw the explosion said the home erupted into flames very quickly, leaving almost no time for the man to have escaped.
This is not the only strange suicide attempt to gain viral interest. As The Inquisitr reported last year, a young man in India was left fighting for his life after shooting himself in his head after his girlfriend’s father told him to prove his love “by killing himself.”
Reports noted that the man posted on his Facebook page, saying he was going to prove his love for the woman to her father. The father reportedly told the young lover that if he survived the suicide attempt, he would be allowed to marry his daughter. The father said if he did not survive the attempt, he and his girlfriend would be reunited in the next life.
The young man had reportedly asked the woman to marry him, but her family objected because the young man did not have financial stability.
Police in Pittsburgh did not name the man who committed suicide by rigging his house to explode.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For readers outside the U.S., visit Suicide.org or Befrienders Worldwide for international resources you can use to find help.
