jbot said:
Didn't that also happen to Bruce Lee's son?
He was killed by a misfired bullet lodged in a gun. It was lodged in the gun barrel, with fake cartridges loaded holding fireworks explosives. When the fireworks explosives went off, it shot the misfired bullet out like a real bullet does.
Jon-Erik Hexum's death information:
On October 12, 1984, after finishing a scene in which he fired several blank rounds from a .44 Magnum revolver, Hexum's character was supposed to unload the gun and reload it with inert dummy rounds, which was required for the next scene in the script—a procedure that Jon-Erik was not familiar with, and which was usually done by the prop masters. The shooting of the next scene was delayed several times. While waiting for the prop masters to unload the blanks from the gun, Hexum jokingly put the gun up to his temple and allegedly said,
"Let's see if I get myself with this one."
Hexum apparently did not realize that blanks use paper or plastic wadding to seal gun powder into the shell, and that this wadding is propelled out of the barrel of the gun with enough force to cause severe injury or death if the weapon is fired at point-blank range, especially if pointed at a particularly vulnerable spot, such as the temple or the eye. Although the paper wadding in the blank that Hexum discharged did not penetrate his skull,[7] the wad struck him in the temple with enough blunt force trauma to shatter a quarter-sized piece of his skull and propel the pieces into his brain.
VS
Brandon Lee's death information:
On March 31, 1993, there were eight days left before the shooting schedule for The Crow was to be completed. The scene being filmed on this day involved Lee's character Eric Draven walking into his apartment and discovering his girlfriend being raped by thugs. This would subsequently lead to Eric being brutally killed, along with his girlfriend, by the thugs. Actor Michael Massee, playing Funboy, one of the film's villains, was supposed to fire a gun at Lee as he walked into his apartment with groceries.
Because the movie's second unit team were running behind schedule, it was decided that dummy cartridges—cartridges that outwardly appear to be functional, but contain no gunpowder or primer—would be made from real cartridges, which had been brought to the set earlier in production. Bruce Merlin, an effects technician, dismantled the live cartridges by removing the bullets, emptying out the gunpowder, detonating the primer and reinserting the bullets. This rendered the cartridges inoperative but realistic in appearance. Merlin and his propmaster, Daniel Kuttner, took initiative to create some blanks by removing live cartridges and replacing the gunpowder with firework powder; the bullets were not reinserted.
Later, a cartridge with only a primer and a bullet was fired in a pistol; this caused a squib load, in which the primer provided enough force to push the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel of the revolver, where it became stuck. The malfunction went unnoticed by the crew, and the same gun was used again later to shoot the death scene, having been re-loaded with blanks. However, the squib load was still lodged in the barrel, and was propelled by the blank cartridge's explosion out of the barrel and into Lee's body. Although the bullet was traveling much slower than a normally fired bullet would be, the bullet's large size and the nearly point-blank firing distance made it powerful enough to severely wound Lee as cameras were rolling at the Carolco Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. Seconds later, director Alex Proyas stopped the scene, but Lee remained on the floor. Stuntman Coordinator (and Lee's friend) Jeff Imada ran over to him with a paramedic, and discovered a thin slit an inch below and to the right of his navel. By this time, Lee had slipped into unconsciousness and was rushed to the hospital where doctors discovered that a bullet was the cause of the damage. They fought for five hours in an attempt to save him, but at 1:04 PM he was pronounced dead at the age of 28.
