Worst Date In History Ends in Sex, Chest Tattoos, Violent Death

If you’re single, you should probably stop reading right here and go get a soda or something, because this is the worst first date that could possibly ever happen and will likely put you off dating forever. Trust me, you won’t be able to handle it and a Diet Coke would be delicious right now.

For the rest of us who are willing to deal with the fact that horrible things happen to people, especially when on dates, I give you the story of the worst first date in history. It starts with drinking and homegrown ink and ends in the possibly accidental (possibly intentional) death of an angry man.

Let me preface the goings-on in Gig Harbor, Washington with the following caveat: It is never okay to hit another person, and the fact that the man who died slapped his date (for sleeping with another man while on their date?) is deplorable, just as she is for punching him. But it’s also not okay to steal someone’s truck and run them over with it, fatally injuring them. Actually, none of this is okay and I feel that I’m writing about it partly because I literally gasped when I read this story and this is my way of processing it because my therapist is out of town this week.

Anyway, enough about my troubles. According to The News Tribune, 53-year-old Leon Shaw was on a date with an unidentified 47-year-old woman when things went terribly, terribly wrong. According to reports, the two had only known each other for mere hours and had had a good time drinking when they decided to visit the home of Shaw’s friend, who just happened to be a tattoo artist.

At the artist’s home, the unidentified woman asked for a chest tattoo (in the middle of the night) and the artist obliged. During the tattooing process, the woman and the tattoo artist (which sounds like the title of something I would have written in my creative writing class in 2004) began to grow intimate, making Shaw, who thought this was his date, angry. Not much is known about what happened next, but detectives say that Shaw grew angry, the woman punched him and he slapped her back. Then, she ran out of the house, stole Shaw’s pickup truck while half-naked. When Shaw went outside to see what was going on, he was run over and his truck was crashed. By the time the police came, Shaw was dead and his date was in critical condition.

This is awful. The police haven’t been able to interview the woman yet due to her injuries, but I am worried (as horrible as this date sounds) that someone might not be telling the truth. It’s possible, of course, that everyone was just incredibly drunk and acted badly, but it’s also possible that the woman was trying to escape because she was being attacked by Shaw and/or his friend. The detectives on the case are just as stumped.

“We still have some investigating to do,” Ed Troyer, the sheriff’s spokesperson told The News Tribune. The woman has not been charged with a crime.