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ST. PAUL PIONEER-PRESS ROSEVILLE, MINNESOTA From 13 feet up, Josh Thompson saw the man coming, jogging, actually — and then, suddenly, breaking into a sprint. By the time the man dove arm-first into the massive tree chipper — meant to grind 21-inch-diameter trunks in a matter of seconds — Thompson had leapt to the ground. Frantically, he yanked on a safety lever, shutting the machine down. But it was bad: The man — who had been wandering uncomfortably close to the industrial-grade tree chipper for about 15 to 20 minutes — had his arm and shoulder pulled into the teeth of the machine. Heavy, block-shaped teeth — meant to grip and pull, rather than grind — were closing upon the man's head with 13,000 pounds of pressure. His hand may have reached the spinning grinders 3 feet inside. But he was alive. "A split-second later, and it would've been over. The rpm on that thing probably wouldn't drop half a point with a human body going through it," said Cory Groholski, vice president of Precision Landscape & Tree Inc. Groholski's crew was contracted to remove trees at 2611 Rice St. in Roseville when the Thursday afternoon incident took place. "If Josh would've taken his time, done the safe thing and stepped down the ladder, the guy would be gone. They (the crew) saved him, whether he wanted to be saved or not," Groholski said. Thompson, in the high seat of an adjacent log loader, was angling a massive log toward the chipper at the time, and dropped a good story before landing upon the side of the 9-foot-tall wood chipper. Two other crewmembers pulled the man out. A fourth called 911. Though the man's right arm, shoulder and chest area were badly mangled, there was hardly any blood, the workers noted with surprise. They told the man to relax. He appeared to, saying not a word, his eyes rolling back and forth. "It bothers us a lot. That was our last piece for the day. Fifteen seconds more, and we would have been out of there," Groholski said. Crew members — including Groholski, who left the site just minutes before the incident happened — had yelled at the man several times to stay back. They thought he was an employee at a nearby hardware store, just getting off his shift. "He looked kind of mopey, head down. I yelled at him to stay back once. He said, 'OK,' and walked away," Groholski said. "He looked like he was contemplating before he did it," said witness Jerel Payne, who lives besides the land where the trees were being cut down. Payne described the man as white, 5-feet-11 to 6-feet tall, slim, with scraggly brown hair. "He just looked like an ordinary guy," Payne said. Until he dove. "Have you seen the movie 'Fargo'?" Payne asked, referring to the 1996 movie with an infamous wood chipper murder scene. "I saw his feet in the air. That's something you would never imagine happening. ... His arm was dangling; his guts were hanging out; his head was cut up." "There is no way on earth to prevent that kind of intentional entry into the machine," said Ivan Brand, senior technical coordinator for product safety for Vermeer Corp., which makes the BC2100 industrial chipper, the model at the scene. Police said it was clear the 20-year-old Roseville man was attempting suicide. They would not identify him. "It's a medical situation, and we feel that information is protected under data privacy," said Roseville police Lt. Lorne Rosand. Some media reports say the man lived nearby, but Rosand would not confirm or deny that. Employees at a business across the street from the scene said the man's torso and head appeared to be entirely wrapped in gauze as he was placed into the ambulance. The man was taken to Regions Hospital. Rosand was unsure whether the man would survive and was unable to report his condition Friday. Suicide by wood chipper is not unheard of. In 2001, a 43-year-old Canadian woman left a four-page suicide note before throwing herself into a wood chipper on her family's acreage near Ottawa. She died. In 2000, a Phoenix man killed himself with a wood chipper, and tried to drag his fiancee in with him. The fiancee survived.
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