Get Your Copy Journal Of The Dead: A Story Of Friendship And Murder In The New Mexico Desert Produced By Jason Kersten Distributed As Bound Copy

written out a big long review regarding this book, but I'm still not finished and I'm tired of wasting my time on this.
So I'll leave this snippet, Perhaps later I'll revisit it,

Peter "Bigfoot" Busnack's evidence is anecdottal at best and should not have been admitted, Unripe pickly pears are indeed very bitter, but do not result in the vommitting and other symptoms Busnack is attributing to their ingestion.
I note that Busnack's allegations don't include the names of his two students who suffered at the hands of nopales and an unripe fruit.


Sorry, I'm Mexican, We eat these fruits and nopales all the time, Busnack's a crock of shit and is obviously involved only to grab himself a bit of limelight, I'm sure he's glad that his survival classes get a little free advertisement from his use in this trial,

My attempts at digging up an actually credible source for potential allergic reactions to unripe cactus fruit have revealed absolutely nothing which backs up Busnack's claims.
The only mention of an allergy towards cactus fruit is from Pubmed and only mentions respitory symptoms, not gastrointestinal ones of the caliber Busnack describes.


Busnack is not a doctor, has no medical training, and has written no academic journals describing the effects he describes unripe cactus fruits as having.
His credibility is nill. He is not an expert witness and his testimony is completely useless,
Haunting

I think a lot of us are fascinated with tales of treks across the desert, about what the desert can do to the unwary and unprepared.
We can see those vultures circling and we can feel the chapped lips, the mouth so dry that we can hardly speak, and we can see the shimmer of the heat on the dry rocks and sand and hear the wind whispering, and we can be enveloped by the silence.


In this true crime tale Maxim magazine senior editor Jason Kersten expands on an article he wrote for that magazine and turns it into a modest book.
It is a engrossing story about two young men, close friends, who travel west and get lost in Rattlesnake Canyon in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park without any water.
As dehydration, fatigue, and hopelessness set in, the two men prepare to die, One of them, David Coughlin, is vomiting violently, hour after hour, He is in such pain that, so the story goes, he asks his friend Raffi Kodikian to kill him, to put him out of his misery.


Some hours later the next day their camp is spotted and the rangers come, They find Kodikian alive in the tent, He tells them where Coughlin's body is and confesses that he stabbed him through the heart as an act of mercy,

What makes this story work, and what makes it worth an entire book, is the uncertainty that still exists about Raffi Kodikian: did he kill his friend, as he claims, because he could not bare to see him suffer anymore, or did he have a more

sinister motive Kersten's narrative clearly leans toward the idea that Kodikian's action was a delusional mercy killing however most of the law enforcement people mentioned in the book find Kodikian's story unconvincing.
Kersten himself allows that in all the literature he could find, there was only one story of a mercy killing in the desert.
Apparently it is an extremely rare event, Furthermore, the Rattlesnake Canyon they couldn't find their way out of is not that big, As Kersten terms it, Rattlesnake Canyon "is just a crackfive miles long, seven hundred feet deep, . . "

Another factor that makes this story interesting is the law itself and the defense chosen by famed New Mexico lawyer Gary Mitchell and his assistant Shawn Boyne.
Since New Mexican law defines a mercy killing as a murder, period, and is not a complete defense to the crime, the lawyers had to come up with something better.
Boyne made an argument for "involuntary intoxication" and it seemed to fit, Only problem was, according to the legal definition of that defense an agent of intoxication was required, Instead what they had was lack of water, Curiously, they might have argued that the juice of the prickly pear cactus fruit was the agent, but for some reason they did not.
Kersten reports that eating prickly pear cactus fruit was probably part of the reason Coughlin vomited so violently,

Finally I have to say that Kersten does an excellent job with limited resources, He was not able to interview Kodikian, who refused his entreaties, so he had to reconstruct the story from the trial transcript and from interviews with other people, none of whom, of course, was in the canyon with the two men.
Kersten also does a fine job of placing the story within the historical context of the New Mexican desert and deserts everywhere while making it clear how people die of thirst and how the law works in cases like this.


However, as I finished the book, I was left somewhat dissatisfied as other readers were, not so much because I found Kodikian's story unbelievable or even because I doubted it, but because I felt that I did not really know Kodikian.
We can see that "he appears to be," as Kersten reports, "quite a welladjusted young man" who "had good friends" and appeared to enjoy life.
Kersten adds, "He could be me or fifty people I know, " p. x In fact the only negative thing anybody said about Kodikian was that he could be stubborn,

I wondered as I finished the book if a stubborn person may be more likely to believe in his own judgment against the laws of men and be more willing to do something forbidden than the average person.
I wonder, but I don't think that fully explains it, I really believe that the desert can do crazy things to our minds, especially when we are tired and thirsty and the implacable terrain shimmers and dances into a confusing mosaic as we become more and more removed from conventional reality and from hope.
At such times in such circumstances we may very well become confused about what is right and what is wrong, At least I think that is what happened to David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian,

Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri” I have wanted to read this book for a long and I haven't wanted to read it.
No, it's not because it involves a grisly murder involving two young hikers who allegedly became disoriented and lost in the New Mexican desert in August and one allegedly begged the other to end his suffering by killing him.
It's because i knew and played with the deceased and his brother as a child, His maternal grandmother lived across the street from me, I still have pictures with him as a boy, . .

Much of what actually happened is unknowable because the story mostly comes from the lone survivor, There are facts that support his story, but there are an abundance of sufficient facts to cast doubt as well,

I thought the author did a good research job telling back stories of that slice of land, past difficulties trying to survive its desolate landscape and bout some of the attorneys involved.
Whether or not justice was served, he leaves to the individual reader,

I recall seeing at least one of the television documentaries on this tragedy after it happened in, In a way, this book gave me some closure, albeit still not a satisfactory one, .