The Darwin Awards are given every year to "those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it." In other words, the awards are given to those who are too stupid to live… literally.
The 2009 Darwin Award winners were announced, and they included a Greensboro (N.C.) woman:
(3 June 2009, North Carolina) Greensboro was innundated with four inches of pouring rain in two hours, stranding several cars on flooded roads. Rosanne T., 50, was not deterred. She hopped on her moped and drove to a convenience store where she "possibly had a beer," according to her mother, before deciding to blunder home through the storm. She phoned home to say, "My moped has two rubber wheels, Mom, I'll be fine."
North Carolina does not require a license to own a moped. Ms. T. had acquired hers two years previously after a DUI conviction.
The Highway Patrol had blocked off several roads that were inundated with water, including Rosanne's path home. But she rode right past the officer and the barriers, lost control of her vehicle, and fell into the swollen creek below. The officer retrieved rope from his vehicle and proceeded to haul her from the water.
He then interviewed the woman, probably inquiring about her motivation for speeding through a roadblock during a flash flood. When the officer returned to his patrol car to call for assistance, Rosanne took the opportunity to escape–by jumping back into the creek!
The officer attempted to rescue her again, but alas, it was too late.
The victim's mother speculated that her daughter's motivation for jumping into a flooded creek was to rescue her drowning moped. "She loved that thing."
The 2009 winners were from Belgium:
(26 September 2009, Belgium) The city of Dinant is the backdrop for this rare Double Darwin Award. Two bankrobbers attempting to make a sizeable withdrawal from an ATM died when they overestimated the quantity of dynamite needed for the explosion. The blast demolished the building the bank was housed in. Nobody else was in the building at the time of the attack.
Robber One was rushed to the hospital with severe head trauma; he died shortly after arrival. Investigators initially assumed that his accomplice had managed a getway, but the second bungler's body was excavated from the debris twelve hours later. Would-be Robbers One and Two weren't exactly impoverished–their getaway car was a BMW.
The other winner was this guy:
He phoned authorities when he got into trouble, but he wasn't able to tell them where he was, because he didn't know how to operate his GPS device, which he packed with him.
His body washed up on the beaches a few weeks later.