VIDEO OF THE CRASH HAS FUELED SPECULATION

This is sad to think it could be true.
VIDEO OF THE CRASH HAS FUELED SPECULATION THAT SABOTAGE, PERHAPS AN INCENDIARY DEVICE, WAS THE CAUSE OF THE CRASH AND SUBSEQUENT FIRE.

In Michael Clayton, George Clooney narrowly escapes immolation when a car bomb takes out his Mercedes on a deserted country road. Clooney portrays an attorney marked for death by an agricultural conglomerate after a colleague uncovers documents that tie the company to a carcinogenic weed killer.

BuzzFeed Reporter Michael Hastings Dies in Car Accident at Age 33
Journalist Michael Hastings’ death early Tuesday morning, June 18, in Los Angeles after the Mercedes C250 coupe he was driving slammed into a palm tree at high speed has sparked conspiracy theories that Hastings, like Clooney’s Clayton, was targeted for his investigative reporting. The crash was so intense that the car’s engine and transmission were found 100 feet from the main wreckage.

Video of the spectacular fire consuming the car has fueled speculation that sabotage, perhaps an incendiary device, was the cause of the crash and subsequent fire.

As The Truth About Cars website noted, at least half seriously: “I’ve seen dozens of cars hit walls and stuff at high speeds and the number of them that I have observed to eject their power trains and immediately catch massive fire is, um, ah, zero. Modern cars are very good at not catching fire in accidents.”

“As a Mercedes owner, these are the safest cars in the world,” a commenter posted on Reddit. “Explosion … fireball, engine [flies] down the block. Not your typical crash.”

But post-crash fires are, in fact, depressingly typical, especially in high-speed scenarios, says Philadelphia attorney Max Kennerly, whose firm represents plaintiffs in car fires.

“If someone is driving at high speed and hits a very solid object, yeah, you’ll get a fire out of that,” Kennerly says. “It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that every day, a lawsuit is filed over a car fire right after an accident. There are every year 300,000 vehicle fires and a couple hundred deaths and a couple thousand injuries.”

Frank Markus, technical director of Motor Trend, points out that “any impact at speeds high enough to rip the drive train out of a car is highly likely to force some object to rupture the fuel tank. There is a lot of potential chemical energy in a gas tank that's even a quarter full. Getting up to such speeds -- providing he didn't start a cold engine and floor the car into that tree -- results in a lot of red hot parts, particularly the catalytic converter and other exhaust system parts.”
A car’s interior, Kennerly says, is particularly flammable.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/car-experts-michael-hastings-crash-572699

I already read about that strange accident

RIP Michael Hastings


Hope someday we will know how went

RIP Michael Hastings

Hastings sent out an email hours before the crash:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/23-2

Wow I didn't know there was a doubt about his death....again life imitating art?

From above link

Published on Sunday, June 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
JOURNALIST HASTINGS SENT OUT MYSTERIOUS EMAIL HOURS BEFORE DEATH

'I'm onto a big story, and need to go off the radar for a bit'
- Common Dreams staff

Journalist Michael Hastings sent an e-mail to his friends and colleagues just hours before he died last week in which he said his “close friends and associates” were being interviewed by the FBI and that Hastings needed to “go off the radar for a bit.”

KTLA-TV in Los Angeles reported Saturday that Hastings said in the email he was “onto a big story.” Hastings sent the email around 1 p.m. Monday June 17, 15 hours before he died in an early Tuesday morning car crash in Hollywood.
Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who had known Hastings since 2008 when the journalist was embedded in his unit in Afghanistan, told KTLA that he received the email from Hastings on Monday:

“On Monday morning, I woke up and I got an email, and it’s very panicked,” Biggs said.
He was blind-copied on the email, which was sent to Hastings’ colleagues.
In part, it said that the feds were interviewing his close friends and associates, and that he was onto a big story and needed to get off the radar.

The FBI has denied that Hastings was ever under investigation.
“It alarmed me very much,” Biggs said. “I just said it doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me,” he said.

Ok, I'm just going to move this to the non-George part of the forum.