I can neither find it here nor there, but it is somewhere. I have read about it. Somewhere, in a more developed country where accidents are not caused by bahati mbaya, an accident happened.
Police opened a murder investigation, where both the accused were treated each as the suspect and victim. Both also died in the crash.
See, they had been married, and at some point they realised they had made a mistake. They stopped living together. They moved to different houses in the same city, and lived their lives separately. This was until they accidentally ran into each other, in their cars, and killed each other.
After a thorough investigation, the police ruled out foul play. Both drivers were neither aware of the others movement that night. They just happened to meet, fatally. So, husband and wife were declared dead after driving into each other.
Police found no foul play or planning. The couples had no idea of each other’s plan for the night.
Coincidence was also behind the start of the first World War. The war started when an Austrian prince was killed by the Serbians. While the assassination was not the primary cause for the war, Europe had been preparing for a war, with the main reason being Germany missing out on the colonial scramble for Africa.
However, the killing of the Austrian prince saw Austria declare war on Serbia in a month, with all European sides immediately taking either of the two sides, and thus in a few months, the whole of Europe was in a war.
The interesting thing though, is that Archduke Ferdinand, the Austrian Prince, has survived being killed. A grenade was thrown at his car, which was travelling too fast that the grenade exploded behind him, hurting those in the car behind.
The good prince, a few hours later, decided to go see those who had been hurt in the grenade attack. On his way, his car stalled. The stalling happened to be just outside a restaurant where his grenade assassin was in. The assassin got out, and finished the job. A single bullet led to the death of millions in the subsequent war.
Moving from deathly coincidence, there are too cartoons(comic scripts) titled Dennis the Menace. Both appeared within 5 days of each other, written by different people, one in the United States, the other in the United Kingdom. The separate cartoons have continued to recently co-exist with each other in peace. No one took the other to court for copying the other, as would happen today if Samsung made a phone that is rectangularly similar to Apple’s iPhone.
Coming to my personal life – I have been hit by lots of coincidences.
First, there’s the coincidence of my former neighbours.
I used to pray not to fall into temptation. Temptation is the nickname of this former hot neighbour of mine. Former neighbour, not former hot, she is still hot. Then she is married, with a kid. Come on, stop pointing accusing fingers at me, the fact that she is married does not make her any less hot.
I used to see her everywhere – at the mama mbogas, when I alighted the matatu, when I went to buy late breakfast. All this time I never talked to her, doing my best to keep temptation away.
Then I moved. A sigh of relief. I still live in the neighbourhood. Temptation did not take this lying down. Almost every trip to the butchery saw me meeting my former neighbour. Even going to catch the matatu sees me meeting her.
She’s not the only one. I kept running into another old neighbour everywhere in the CBD, uptown, downtown. You would think the odds would be low in a city of 3 to 4 million. The other day, I took a walk through the University of Nairobi. Believe it or not, I saw the damned chap there!
Which makes me wonder, do atheists believe in coincidence? Ever had some weird coincidences?