Mike Lynch's co-defendant in fraud trial 'fatally struck' by car while jogging | Hacker News Reader

Mike Lynch's co-defendant in fraud trial 'fatally struck' by car while jogging

theguardian.com

72 pointsFluorescence86 comments

Some background for those that do not know why Mike Lynch is supposed to be: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/19/who...

Or, you know, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Lynch_(businessman)

(As it's better to read from the original source that the writer of the above piece used to write their piece, he said, not being sure if he were being snarky or honest)

Now I'm confused, Wiki cites the Guardian piece as a source...

I keep wondering what Mick Lynch was doing on a luxury yacht.

You mean "Rail baron Mick Lynch" - the dailymail would have you believe he spends most of his time on luxury yachts.

Burning HP's money, that's what.

Vulnerable road user murdered by driver.

Always those softening words when a driver murders an innocent.

If driving were as dangerous as that we'd have no commerce! Imagine being fully liable for injuries you cause while mindlessly travelling at high speeds across populated areas. Nobody could afford to do it!

The spice must flow!

Isn't it like that in mainland CN?

I guess you're referring to this: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chinese-drivers-kill-pedes...

Words mean things. Murder requires the intent to kill. Occasionally people are murdered by someone with a car, but an accident - even an entirely avoidable accident caused by gross recklessness - is not murder.

Some jurisdictions have the felony murder rule (abolished in the UK in 1957). That means it could be murder if you kill somebody while committing a felony, which includes drunk driving and fleeing in a police chase (and things like forgery and cybercrime, less relevantly).

In the US, depending on the state, murder need not require intent to kill or cause death. For example, 3rd degree murder in Minnesota explicitly states that the perpetrator acted without intent to cause death [1].

The theory behind murder requiring intent is very reasonable but, at least by statute, isn't actual legal practice.

[1]: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.195

Proving intention is very hard without evidence.

There are no "accidents", only collisions.

How does the saying go? "If you want to kill someone and get away with it, kill them with your car!" We are so lenient on traffic violence, at least in the USA.

Ah-ah-ah, there are also allisions.

Not defending the driver, but there's no pavement/sidewalk on the piece of most of that road, although the visibility is good and it was 10am on a Saturday

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3423362,0.2274592,3a,75y,335...

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/local-news/family-step...

If you look at his Strava route he was running along the riverside footpath. His route ends where it meets the road to the south east of Stretham:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/son-of-mike-lynchs-trag...

He would most likely have been trying to cross the road to continue his run on the path on the other side. I've run this route along the river myself.

This area is part of the Fenland, so the land is very flat. As a result the road bridge over the river is raised up above the level of the surrounding area.

This means that as he was crossing the road he would have been invisible to any car approaching from the other side of the bridge until it crested the bridge. It's entirely possible that a car travelling fast - the speed limit on that road is 60mph but plenty of people exceed it - could have come over the bridge and the driver would have seen him too late to stop in time.

The placement of the footpath crossing, unsighted from one direction, is - as you can tell - far from ideal.

When I'm driving on that road I ease off approaching the bridge: in part this is because I know there's that footpath crossing the road on the other side. But it's also - and whilst I don't want to be too harsh to the driver involved here there's really no excuse for this having happened - because I'm not a complete moron and know that, regardless of how well I think I know the road, it's unwise to go over a blind crest at speed, and especially in a heavily agricultural area where large, slow moving farm machinery is a commonplace site on local roads.

Is it clear it happened out of town? I googled, and articles, including the one you linked, say "Newmarket Road" in Stretham. And within that town, there seem to be pavements.

Just curious, as you say doesn't make it any less bad for the driver. Though it would be that little bit more mysterious if the Autonomy codefendant was struck on the pavement.

Yes, it's clear it happened out of town. His Strava route is shown on this article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/son-of-mike-lynchs-trag....

He was most likely trying to cross the road to continue his running route along the footpath where it continued to follow the river on the other side.

For any Americans- pavement is the British term for sidewalk

It’s always the dead ones that suddenly “darted in to traffic “. Especially those damn kids!

I can't recall ever witnessing a pedestrian being hit by a car, nor a near miss, except two days ago when someone darted into traffic, and indeed it was a kid. Luckily it was fairly pedestrianised area (which may have given the kid the impression it was safe to dart) so the traffic was quite slow and able to stop in time, so no major harm was done but the poor parents must have had a minor heart attack.

I had a near miss a couple weeks ago in SF, when a woman in a car behind the car waiting for me to cross decided she didn't want to wait.

Maybe a bit less snark and a bit more kindness is called for here?

One person is fatally injured, another confirmed dead, and severel others are missing, perhaps dead too. Many people who know them will be hurting right now.

Was this car autonomous? Unless it was, they were killed by a driver, not “struck by a car”.

We don’t say people were fatally injured in bullet-related collisions…

Never mess with the FBI, CIA, Boeing and Hewlett Packard

I'm afraid of my ink printer.

I have a new found respect for my ink printer. I didnt realise just what it was capable of.

I can't imagine having bought one recently enough to have it still working. Those things are such garbage.

I’m glad I tossed mine years ago. HP can kill me anyway, I almost don’t care. The world has gone to shit and it’s almost not worth living in anymore.

We’ve let capitalism destroy everything good.

There are few things as chilling as the realization that corporations and other interests may not be above trying to kill you. It is not as bad as the realization that political killings in US happen as well, but it is up there.

If I am not mistaken the "fraud trial" referenced in the title is not the trial in the case brought by HP. HP won, though they may have appealed the amount of the settlement. The title likely refers to the criminal trial in the case brought by the US government where the defendants were acquitted on all charges.

A summary of HP's win in the UK:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240717060827if_/https://www.ju...

The fraud charges in the US:

https://ia903108.us.archive.org/16/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...

It's a fun conspiracy that both co-defendants died within a day or two of eachother, but how the hell would the conspirators have sank a yacht this way? "It sank quickly after being hit by a waterspout at 4:30 a.m. during a storm that broke the mainmast, possibly unbalancing and capsizing the yacht."

Don't underestimate the capabilities of Sicilian organized crime especially on their own territory. I guess a spacious penthouse in New York could easily stir a tiny local tornado nearby Sicily.

If you already "prepared" the yacht - say bought the cooperation of some member of the crew or planted some device or, that being a modern yacht, hacked something on it - that would have been a great time to trigger it. The yacht was a sitting duck on that anchorage. I really was surprised that such a yacht went down that way, especially given that ships nearby were just fine. Now, with that guy in England dying the way Russian oppositioners die there, my surprise got resolved.

And remembering how those EBay execs went after those people only for bad reviews, one can imagine what the people like this can do when it comes to real money. And the scale of the money involved here can buy impressively "accidental" accidents.

The yacht had the 2nd tallest mast (tallest aluminium mast). The tornado/waterspout snapped the mast, which made the ship unbalanced and capsize. It sank quickly after that.

Not that out of the ordinary. There was another waterspout photographed in Italy that same day; they’re not that uncommon.

> snapped the mast, which made the ship unbalanced and capsize. It sank quickly after that.

Hardly.

The weight of the mast is bogger all compared to the keel. You are supposed to have sails in those which give a perpendicular force to the mast.

>snapped the mast, which made the ship unbalanced and capsize.

that sounds strange for a sailboat designed to keel a lot. And the unbroken mast has higher leverage, yet the boat keels without capsizing. And capsizing is usually not that great an issue too.

As someone with a sailboat who sails just about every week (since I live on it and have to keep moving) I'm also having a pretty hard time understanding this one.

In high winds removing the mast should make it less prone to capsizing just like reefing would.

EDIT: Oh I see they're thinking it's the waves not the wind.

Lots of independent sources suggest that the mast can increase resistance to capsizing and that losing a mast can make a boat more prone to capsizing.

https://www.morganscloud.com/2008/08/01/sailboat-stability-c...

Overall, the topic of sailboat stability is complex enough that books have been written on the subject: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=o3edvBByudgC&o...

I would not dive into conspiracy theories on the basis of whatever back-of-an-envelope intuitions you might have here.

Also here: https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f55/can-a-mast-be-too-t...

>Counterintuitively [a boat with a tall mast] will be be more capsize resistant, capsize is a dynamic phenomenon and increase mast height provides a vastly disproportionate increase in roll moment of inertia which resists capsize. Stability is a static phenomenon even when the boat is moving thru the water and provides little if any resistance to capsize.

If I Did It ... would be Wile E. Coyote style. Half saw the keel off and let a storm, major or minor finish off the job.

obviously they got hold of HARP weather control!

Are there any pics or videos of said water spout?

Weather seeding is still a conspiracy theory, right?

"sunk"

I'm disappointed by the conspiratorial tone here.

They had already been acquitted, sinking a yacht in a freak tornado makes zero sense as a way of assassinating someone, and the woman who hit Stephen Chamberlain with her car remained at the scene.

Sometimes things just happen!

It's just more fun this way, isn't it? It might be rude or tone deaf but I don't think that anyone is serious on claiming that it was an assassination.

How could "they?" had pulled it off?

Scenario 1: They risk losing their money and go to jail because they expect that the court decision be reversed over some evidence they expect to surface. Both are actually alive, Lynch sabotaged his yacht to fake his death, used the storm to make it plausible. The co-defendant falsified hospital records, it was all coordinated based on the weather forecast.

Scenario 2: Someone held responsible over the huge loss decided to send a message. Paid someone to sabotage the yacht, knowing Lynch's plans to sail and the weather forecast also killed the co-defendant by making someone hit him on his daily jogging rutine.

Both unplausible, still fun. Murder mystery and conspiracy are popular genre.

Indeed.

And let's not forget there were plenty of other rich and powerful people on that yacht - for example the international chair of Morgan Stanley is also missing.

Though Morgan Stanley did downgrade HP on the 19th causing a 3.5% stock fall....

Wow - these conspiracies are so easy to make up.

LPT: never steal from people more than it costs to have you killed

And Mike Lynch is missing not 24 hour before when the yacht he was on sunk. A hell of a coincidence.

Also adding that several top members of Mike Lynch's legal team were on the yacht, and one has been reported as missing.

Well they were celebrating winning the trial so that part makes sense.

sunk by a freaking tornado at that...

The only reason I can't go full tinfoil on this is that it takes a hell of a lot of things working out to fake your death by sailing into a fortuitous freak tornado. How would you even plan and execute that? If he'd just disappeared from the boat in the night or something it would be a different story.

But it sure is weird as hell.

> is that it takes a hell of a lot of things working out to fake your death by sailing into a fortuitous freak tornado

It takes hell of a lot less things working out to actually die after a freaking Panavia Tornado[0] unexpectedly drops something on you.

Not that I'm draped in tinfoil or anything, but the more I read about all this, the more it feels like watching a thriller.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panavia_Tornado

The faker of his death could wait for any storm and pull the plug of the boat, though.

Not like 'I hope there is a storm the 15th of May'.

I agree, but they are choosing a dead end path:

whoever wants to know where they are can sample DNA from as many relatives as possible, surreptitiously.

Nanopores can be made with dielectric breakdown of a thin piece of etched wafer.

Low input current noise op-amps can be used to measure the nanopore signal.

A dedicated skip tracer will find you through environmental DNA.

That sounds like science fiction. Do those machines exist today?

Currently duck-duck-go-ing "hewlett packard weather engineering".

It is now clear that all those Climate Research super computers HP has been involved in have yielded unexpected new capabilities... please subscribe to my newsletter to learn more.

Subscribed. Maybe they never stopped working on "The Machine", after all? ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(computer_architec...

during the covid pandemic and the container ship that blocked the Suez canal, there were sites tracking the movements of ship transponders.

do we have a similar track for this yacht? was it intentionally moving towards the tornado?

do you have a link for the tornado presence?

So, the weather manipulation devices are really existing? /s

Switched to Epson. Air-gapped.-

Why was yacht move to deeper waters shortly before it sank ?? A submarine needs depth A large submarine venting it's ballast tanks beneath a ship could easily sink a 52 metre yacht Bodies found aboard yacht, most likely dead before yacht was sunk

Corporate America is nefarious like Russian intelligence. We are not even allowed in Europe a one silly 11bn startup.

The issue may not necessarily be the whole 11B. Just theoretical example from an imaginary world - say A buys something worth 5B from B for a very inflated price of 11B using somebody else's money, and B promises to kick-back to A a half of that over-payment, i.e. say 3B. And refuses to do that after the deal is done. That would probably make A very angry.

Timeline, because it is not obvious:

    2024-08-17 Saturday morning: Chamberlain hit by car

    2024-08-19 Monday early morning: Yacht "Bayesian" sinks

    2024-08-19 Monday morning: First news reporting of the car accident (doesn't get much attention)

    2024-08-19 Monday morning: First reporting of Lynch missing

    2024-08-20 Tuesday: First reports of Chamberlain's death

So, the car accident was before the maritime incident. It is not clear to me when Chamberlain died.

The timing is weird .. fate?

if you can find the spontaneous rates of yachts sinking with eventually dead or missing people and spontaneous rates of people getting hit by a car and dying, you can calculate the likelihood for 2 such unordered events appearing within a surprisingly short amount of time.

obviously the p-value for the null hypothesis that this is just random coincidence is miniscule in this case.

in the long run formal verification and statistics will publically catch up with all these shenanigans.

If by “fate” you mean “hitmen paid by HP in a very hard to trace way”, then yes!

Anyone at HP that is reading, I just want to appologies for calling your printer a "piece of garbage designed by idiots". I didnt mean it, I am very sorry and I will be renewing my subscription today.

Nevertheless, I will be avoiding jogging and yachts for the next few months.

My favourite about HP is how they were charged by US authorities for corruption in Poland while Polish authorities haven't found anything on them.

not related to HP, but in the same way German officials were found to have corrupted Portuguese politicians over the purchase of 3 submarines, yet the Portuguese police didn't find any wrongdoing.

https://corruption-tracker.org/case/german-submarine-sales-t...

Paulo Portas still has his cushy prime-time pundit job to this day, he's in line for the presidency.

His stack of photocopies protects him from any whistleblowing...

German industry is well known to corrupt in "corrupted" countries.

To corrupt "corrupted" government officials would be more exact. Unless you think Germany has some moral high ground on Portugal which just the last 100 of history years should give you different ideas about comparing countries outright like this.

In context of Germany I heard multiple times a phrase "ethical superpower" used unironically. I that helps, both Poland and Portugal would be in "corrupted" basket.

Because they pay more bribes? Or because they get caught more often?

oh they never get caught, and punished? it's unheard of

Executives are reading The Art of War too literally.

Well, the main lesson in that classic book is actually, if you do it right as a general, you don't have to fight at all.

It also says you should let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

Clearly HP management read that and decided an unexpected storm at 4am was as close to a dark night thunderbolt as they could get.

Straight from Boeing's corporate playbook

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