Elephant Gun

“El principito” de Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Everything you need in one spot

que necesito.

In the early hours of August 23rd, 1987, a train driver noticed there were two people laying in parallel on the tracks, partially covered by a green tarp, in Bryant, Arkansas. Next to one of the bodies rested a .22 rifle. Despite the frantic honking, the figures didn’t move a fraction of an inch from their place. The driver urgently slammed on the brakes, but it was impossible to stop the train this late and the bodies that lay side-by-side on the tracks had both been run over. The bodies were later identified as 16-year-old Don Henry and his best friend Kevin Ives, just a year older. The boys had arrived at the tracks a little after midnight to go hunting with Don’s .22 rifle and smoke marijuana. The State medical examiner concluded that the boys smoked twenty joints and were in a deep sleep as the fast-moving train advanced them, and their deaths were ruled accidental. However, the victims’ families didn’t buy it and pressed the police to reopen the case. Five months later, a new autopsy was performed and the results were staggeringly different from the first. The autopsy revealed that the boys had only smoked 1-3 joints together, and stab marks were visible on Don’s t-shirt. One of the boys was already dead by the time the train had hit them, the other unconscious. An investigator found that a similar case had occurred just three years prior, when two young men were found dead laying in the same positions on the tracks. Nonetheless, the case of boys on the train tracks was never solved.