Can you suffocate someone with a pillow

No comments Permalink Share No comments. Y es, it's been done many times. You don't have to deny someone of ALL the air, just enough so that they don't get enough air to stay alive.

Y es, if you cut off enough oxygen to the brain for long enough death will occur. Rickster is victorious. W ell, your question is based on a homicidal act. What is the purpose of this question?

Y es 1 "A Hempstead man was charged early Tuesday with attempted murder after he tried to suffocate the mother of his two children with a pillow, police said. It's not like in the movies, where putting a pillow over someone's mouth makes them go limp in about 15 seconds. Not only do you have to keep smothering them long enough for them to lose consciousness, you have to CONTINUE smothering them for some time after they've lost consciousness and gone limp in order to actually kill them.

In the meantime, pleasant things like loss of bowel control occur! So, uh, yeah, it doesn't seem like much of an accident. The boy was taken to a hospital, where he was declared deceased. Amanda Reagan Smith was injured as well. She was treated and released from the hospital that night. No one knows how they achieve this, for they are not solid. They do not like light, but the stronger the demon, the more light it can handle.

They attack in the dark, covering a victim to suffocate it, kind of like smothering someone with a pillow. Perhaps they use these crappy pillows in hospitals to make sure that nobody attempts to re-create "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". God knows that some kid saw the movie on TV and then decided to try it out on their friends.

Damn kids. Plausible deniability is the name of the game. If a person is pushed off a high building or bridge and no one sees it, only suicide or accident can be considered in any verdict. Likewise, if someone is strong enough and willful enough, they can smother someone with a pillow and no autopsy will determine cause of death.

Near the end of Dead Again , the detective is given the key to the murder mystery after talking to a housebound old woman. The woman is subsequently visited by the murderer, who gently makes sure she's comfortably tucked up in bed and then suffocates her with her pillow. In Death Walks on High Heels , the killer murders Nicole by smothering her with a cushion: the only one of his victims he does not kill by slitting their throat.

Played with in John Waters ' Desperate Living : it doesn't take more than a few seconds for maid Grizelda Brown Jean Hill to kill Peggy Gravel Mink Stole 's husband, but then again a lb woman sitting on a man's face ain't exactly a pillow A different version in Dillinger Dillinger's gang have to flee their hideout after G-Men attack, but one of them is too wounded to flee, so Pretty Boy Floyd covers his face with a pillow and shoots his pistol into it.

This is right in the middle of a gunfight involving automatic weapons, so it's more like a blindfolded execution than a covert murder. In Emelie , the eponymous babysitter attempts to do this to one of her charges, only to realize he's no longer in the bed. The Escapist : After battering Tony with a chair , Lacey grabs a pillow and attempts to finish him off with it.

He might have succeeded if Frank hadn't hauled him off. In The Good Son Henry attempts to do this to his sister Connie after he had earlier tried to drown her by pushing her onto thin ice, he stops because he notices his mother is in the room and pretends he was fluffing her pillows to cover it up. Toyed with in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when Angel Eyes "the Bad" , played by Lee Van Cleef , does the Sickbed Slaying of his erstwhile employer by first covering over the guy's face with the pillow, then shoots twice through it into the guy's face.

Gore Orphanage has the trope performed with a teddy bear. The Grey Zone : In the opening, the Sonderkommandos smother one of their own with a pillow as a mercy kill. Haywire plays with the trope by having the protagonist appear to start to apply the pillow to a defeated opponent — only to instead fire her gun through the pillow to kill the guy instead. The old Hong Kong horror film Hell Has No Boundary has a rather disturbing and graphic example, where a little girl is eliminated by her own parents using a pillow.

Subverted in Inglorious Basterds. During his murder-montage, Hugo Stiglitz is seen shoving a pillow over the face of a Gestapo officer In Joker , while Arthur Fleck was visiting his mother, Penny, in the hospital after finding out he was adopted, he kills her by using her pillow.

Made somewhat plausible by the fact that Lockwood is a crippled, dying old man on life support. Plus, as we only see the lead-up and not the act itself, we don't know how long it took or how easy it was.

In Lady Frankenstein , Charles murders Thomas by suffocating him with a pillow while he having sex with Tanya. In Mudbound , Jamie smothers his father to death in retaliation for the brutal torture and mutilation of Ronsel. In The Naked Gun , a hypnotized doctor is about to suffocate Nordberg with a pillow before Frank Drebin interrupts him.

The doctor throws the pillow at Drebin as he flees, and it inexplicably sticks to Drebin's face. It takes him several seconds of struggling to rip it off. In the Telugu film Narasimhudu , it is revealed in Flashback late in the film that the bad guys, who work for a corrupt politician, did this to Chitti, Narasimha's little sister who they had recently raped , in a Sickbed Slaying at the hospital. The reason they did this was to silence her as a witness , and it would be the final straw that sent Narasimha on the Roaring Rampage of Revenge that he has been on all movie.

She succeeds. The Hindi film, Omkara , being a direct remake of Othello, has this in the end. It's a lot longer than five seconds. The scene actually goes on a painfully long time, but in the end, you know what happens. Esther does this to Danny in his hospital bed in Orphan. He doesn't die, but is left in worse shape than he was before. Ben Healy attempts to do this to Junior in Problem Child , but ultimately doesn't go through with it. He is still holding the pillow for a couple of scenes afterwards, though.

It is an overall more realistic take on the trope as he plants his knee on the pillow and leans on it with with his full body weight for about two full minutes of screentime before she expires. Johnson uses this method to dispatch one of her victims after seducing her.

More plausible than most examples, as the weapon she uses is an inflatable plastic cushion rather than a standard porous fabric pillow. Narrowly averted in Sleeping with the Enemy. When Martin visits Laura's blind mother in the nursing home and tricks her into giving him information, it's heavily implied that he's about to smother her with a pillow - but a nurse walks in just in the nick of time, and he instead tucks the pillow behind her head.

In Superdome , the killer enters Rita's hotel room with a Hairpin Lockpick and smothers her in her sleep. Since Ricky Bobby isn't suffering at all, just napping, he fights Cal off.

Theatre of Blood : When Psaltery thinks his wife is guilty of adultery, he smothers her with a pillow. In Tiger House , Shane tells Kelly he performed a Mercy Kill on Callum's father, who was dying of cancer, by smothering him with a pillow. Miss Malkin puts up more of a struggle than victims of this trope usually do, and Janet ends using her entire body weight to pin the pillow over her face. In Vanilla Sky this is mixed to a disturbing degree with Out with a Bang.

In "By These Presents", by Henry Kuttner , a person signs a Deal with the Devil complete immortality and invulnerability unless he commits suicide That's because the devil took as surety the man's conscience. At the end, he returns it. By then, this case is far from the only reason that the devil gets the man's soul a few seconds later.

Clive Cussler 's Dirk Pitt Adventures novel Night Probe features a murder carried out by this method to facilitate its concealment.

The victim is sufficiently frail and weak that his death is not unexpected in any case, and is too feeble to put up a significant struggle. The murderer uses theatrical makeup to conceal the bruising on the inside of the victim's lips from the pillow pressing them against his teeth.

The Dresden Files : In Cold Days , Mab's first attempt to kill Harry as part of his 'physical therapy' is to try to smother him with his pillow.

Its effectiveness is justified by the fact that Harry has basically been in a coma for over six months, and even then he is able to escape it, with difficulty. In Death Comes as the End , a variation is used on one of the victims who is smothered with linen sheeting used to wrap a mummy. In other words, the killer mummifies the victim alive. Doubles as a Mercy Kill , as Keizo was currently suffering from a plague with a low survival rate, and she wanted to spare him the suffering of that, plus the Hell on Earth she was about to help unleash.

In Stephen King 's It , this is how 5-year-old Patrick Hockstetter kills his baby brother Avery, but he does it by pressing the baby's face into the pillow rather than holding a pillow to his face.

However there's no indication given that it was instantaneous or easy. Then he runs short on time and has to start using knives Native Son features a particularly extreme version of this trope. Not only does the victim die from suffocation by the pillow, but the person killing her didn't even realize what he was doing. What's more, a third person in the room didn't realize what was going on because the sound of the smothering was so negligible. Invoked when Lord Tywin complains about the excessive violence one of his henchmen used to kill a three-year old princess, when gentle words and a soft pillow could have done the job with less fuss.

In The Remittance Kid by J. Edson , one of the anarchists sneaks into a hospital disguised as a priest and uses a pillow to smother a wounded accomplice before he can talk to the police.

In the first book of the War of the Spider Queen series Pharaun confirms Lloth's silence by going to a brothel full of deposed drow noblewomen and having a chat with an ex-priestess. She wants to be released from that horrible place in exchange, and since she knows too much anyways Pharaun does so by smothering her with a pillow, since they charge extra for killing prostitutes and it doesn't leave a mark.

Live Action TV. Angel tries this on Wesley in " Forgiving ", but it doesn't work. Some fans speculate that this was deliberate; he could have killed Wes easily in other ways, but he was really just making a point.

In The Blacklist , Reddington kills Lizzy's father this way. Boardwalk Empire subverts the vorpal part by showing the impracticality of the method : Eli tries to kill the survivor of the Woods Massacre when he reappears, badly wounded, by smothering him with a pillow in a hospital. It takes a very long time, though, makes enough noise to raise suspicions from the patient in an adjacent bed, and Eli is clearly exhausted by the time Van Alden and his agents come in - with the survivor wheezing, but still very much alive.

Carnival Row : Piety kills Absalom using this, when he won't reveal what she wants to know. Subverted on Chuck : Casey plays up this trope when a villain attempts to smother him in his hospital bed.

Said villain falls for it, removes the pillow Subverted in the Swedish series Crimes Of Passion - a murderer sticks a pillow over Amateur Sleuth Puck's face, but after leaving, she regains consciousness. In January, a law went into effect in California requiring law enforcement officers to ask domestic violence survivors if they were strangled, record this information—helping to track those individuals who strangle—and inform survivors of the dangers of internal injuries, urging them to seek medical attention.

Strack says she hopes this results in a decline from suffocation and strangulation deaths, which can sometimes occur a day or more after an assault, even when a survivor feels like he or she is OK. To view the original post, click here…. Search for:. Abusers Use Suffocation as a Power Move Posted on December 3, at am The potentially deadly effects are the same as being strangled By Amanda Kippert We know that abusers strangle their victims as a way to exert power and control over them—they want their victims to know they can kill them at any time.

Suffocation Often Goes Along with Strangulation Based on focus groups with survivors, we know batterers suffocate their victims in order to silence them, says Strack.

Survivors Might Not Recognize Suffocation as Abuse Despite its obvious deadly nature, survivors who have been suffocated may not bring this up with an advocate or support person. All Rights Reserved.