Seems like this kind of stuff, happens every year in the cold, unfortunately. Some kid gets drunk, tries to walk home, and freezes to death. It happened in my town last year. Took two days to find the kid, and they finally found him frozen in a snow bank.
Yup, the human body can probably acclimate to around 30-40 degrees Farenheit, but not as you get to the lower teens and then factor in wind chill. Wearing coats and layers isn't exclusively about warmth as it also shields your skin from condensation, which freezes immediately in those conditions and can rapidly decrease your body temperature.
I live in a college town, and I'm surprised we don't get 15 stories like this a year. On New Year's eight or nine years ago I was the sober driver, and I spent a good portion of my night looking for a friend of my younger brother's, as they had fled from a party while hammered and lost track of each other. My brother, being the smart guy that he is, knew to attempt to walk through the McDonald's drive-thru where I knew I could always find him, trying to get a McChicken with unhappy drivers waiting behind him. (He and my brother, because they're hilarious a-holes, had to run from the party after they decided to spray Pam all over the hardwood floor kitchen of the house while the party was watching the ball drop in the other room; so all these little tiny 20-year old girls in heels, including their girlfriends, would fall on their asses coming into the kitchen to get another rum and Coke.) The kid wasn't picking up his phone, we guessed, because he didn't know my number. He knew that the eventual destination was a bar in Lafayette, across the Wabash River from the college town, so instead using one of two very accessible walkways across the river, the bro saw a mostly-frozen river, saw what he thought was solid ice, and apparently presumed he could just walk across it and into Lafayette. As you'd expect, he got about five feet in before plunging, up to his hips, into a freezing river on Jan. 1 in pitch darkness at 12:30 in the morning. Somehow (he doesn't remember) he got out and made it to a friend's apartment, and this girl basically saved the dude's life (or at the very least, his legs). By football-watching time the next afternoon he was still purple down there. We laughed about it then and I'm still laughing at the Pam story right now, but every so often it hits me that a kid could have died just because he left a party too early, prior to me showing up to get him.
Ya'll b-tches slippin! <img class="irc_mi" style="margin-top: 111px;" src="http://cde.2.trome.pe/ima/0/1/1/1/7/1117346.jpg" width="304" height="172"> <img class="irc_mi" style="margin-top: 0px;" src="https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/elizabeth-luebke.jpg?quality=100&strip=all&strip=all" width="262" height="393">
She was basically at that stupid drunk level where she needed protection from herself. My opinion is her "friends" totally failed her that night by letting her walk out and not giving a darn...even if she was being belligerent or whatever. They had to know how dangerous it could be in that cold. Not sure what their excuse was but no one even bothered. It should have gone like this: "What's her problem? Where are you going? Stop her...she can't go outside like that and walk anywhere! She will die!" It seems to have gone more like this: "What's her problem? Where are you going? Let her go!"
It's sad that it happens but like Kelly I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. I frequently see on even very cold nights in MN girls and guys out on weekends nights not appropriately dressed. In many cases fashion and convenience seems more important than comfort and safety. Add alcohol to the mix, which causes the body to lose heat faster, I'm surprised there aren't more people out stumbling out of a bar or party and freezing to death.
