jerk of the week: jerkfoot

Here’s one you really can’t make up, a person who will no doubt also win a Darwin Award in addition to being named JERK OF THE WEEK!

This week’s “winner” is:

RANDY LEE TENLEY

I don’t have a picture of the late Mr. Tenley, so this will have to do.

What is this, you ask? It’s a ghillie suit, a 3-D camouflage outfit sometimes used by military snipers. Apparently, the 44-year-old Tenley was wearing one at the time of his unfortunate demise. And no, he wasn’t mistakenly shot by a hunter—he was run over by two cars out in Big Sky country.

I’ll let the NBC news affiliate in lovely Kalispell, Montana, tell the story.

Troopers say [Tenley] was in the right-hand lane of Highway 93 South when a 15-year old Somers girl hit him.

“He probably would not have been very easy to see at all,” said Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Jim Schneider.

Another car swerved, and a third car, troopers say driven by a 17-year old Somers girl, ran him over.

“It appears the pedestrian was well into the driving lane,” said Schneider. Officials closed Highway 93 for two hours on Sunday night, as firefighters directed traffic and officers investigated. What they found is troubling.

“According to his companions, he was out there in the ghillie suit attempting to incite a sighting of Bigfoot, to make people think they had seen a Sasquatch.

But, dispatchers received no calls of the sort, just the one that sent emergency crews rushing to the scene. Sunday night’s investigation is ongoing. Troopers say Tenley likely drank alcohol yesterday, but they’re still waiting on toxicology results to see if he was impaired.

Poor Sasquatch—why do we continue to besmirch your noble name? Somewhere, Bobo weeps …

Seriously, although your first impulse is to laugh about how this possibly drunken idiot got himself killed—and really, you probably should—the tragedy here and why Tenley is the jerk of the week is because not one, but two teenaged girls are most likely absolutely traumatized for life by accidentally killing another human being with their motor vehicles. Yeah, it was a joke gone awry and certainly neither one’s fault, but I’m pretty sure they’ll never forget that nightmarish, sickening feeling of hearing a body slam against your car as the life is knocked out of it. Just an awful experience.

It can’t really compare, but I ran over a woodchuck on the Taconic Parkway about 15 years ago and I can still vividly recall the sick thuds as it bounced between the pavement and the car floor as I passed over it. Ugh.

And yes, posthumously calling Tenley a “jerk” is absolutely a case of “speaking ill of the dead,” which is ideal as my Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Connecticut History comes out in on Sept. 18. Rather than wait for a Bigfoot to show up with it, you may just want to pre-order it now at Amazon.com.