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Oklahoma sheriff: 'Spontaneous human combustion' killed 65-year-old man


The Raw Story
February 19, 2013

Area: Fort Smith, Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers

The sheriff of Sequoyah County in Oklahoma believes that a 65-year-old man recently died by spontaneously bursting into flames.

"If you read about spontaneous human combustion that's what we have here," Sheriff Ron Lockhart told KFSM.

After a neighbor contacted police on Monday, authorities discovered the burned body of Danny Vanzandt in the kitchen of his home.

"The body was burned and it was incinerated," Lockhart explained. "You hardly ever have a burned body, especially when there's no damage to the house. Where the fire occurred, there was no damage to the furniture or anything around the fire. So, it was a low-heat fire."

"We started researching and talking to other fire investigators and we started looking at this spontaneous human combustion, and anything that's in that is basically what we have," he added. "It's an unusual and bizarre case, but we're not ruling out spontaneous human combustion."

Lockhart said that Vanzandt drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes, but it was not possible for those factors to cause the type of fire that incinerated the body.

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