FAQ

How do you find these names?
Occasionally, someone will e-mail me with a name to add, but most of them are done by Google News search. My search terms are: Alzheimer’s, amputee, autism, autistic, bedridden, bipolar, blind, chronic, congenital, cystic, deaf, dementia, developmental, disability, disabled, disorder, epilepsy, group home, handicapped, nursing home, palsy, sclerosis, special needs, syndrome, wheelchair. This list of terms is paired with either death, homicide, or murder in three separate searches, each performed daily. The terms were chosen because they will result in articles including some mention of disability, without including too many false-positive results. There are many limitations to using Google, which no longer allows parentheses, has a maximum number of search terms, and keeps accusing me of being a robot; but it’s the best tool I’ve found so far for searching news reports worldwide.

How long have you been managing this list?
Since mid-2014.

Why are there cases from before 2015?
I add names from 1980 until the present day, and it’s not unusual for a news article to mention a homicide from several years ago–for example, when someone convicted of murder comes up for parole.

Why is [name] included?
In this database, unlike the full memorial pages, I include things by default rather than excluding them. That means there’ll be a lot of names here where the initial suspect was acquitted, where the case is unsolved, where the disability isn’t known, where the death was accidental or ruled justified homicide, where the cause of death is unknown, and so on. If someone has been acquitted and their name is still here, that’s because the name makes a good search term and nobody else has been charged, not because I necessarily disagree with the court’s ruling. As a rule of thumb, I include all cases where voluntary human action or inaction resulted in a significant risk to someone with a disability–which can include cases where no law was broken or where no one person was responsible for a particular death.

Your link is broken, or has been moved behind a paywall.
Yep, that happens. These are often links to newspaper articles, and many of them get taken down as time passes. You can try using the Wayback Machine to find an archived version of the page. I don’t remove broken links because they can still be used to find archived pages in this fashion; nor do I replace them, because quite frankly, monitoring every one of these thousands of links would be too much for any one person to do. Hopefully there’s enough information in the entries for a decent researcher to find more information on the Internet or through public records.

Is this a representative sample? Is this an exhaustive list?
Nope, and nope. It’s impossible to get an exhaustive list, short of searching through every single death record and court case, which is prohibitively difficult and expensive. And the sampling, unfortunately, overrepresents cases which are more likely to be covered in the news and be picked up by a search engine. It’s also limited to my location: Since I live in the USA, Google likes to try to tailor my results to the USA; even using a VPN doesn’t stop it from doing this (it will just tailor my results to my new ISP location). I’m also doing my searches in English, which excludes articles not written in English. If there isn’t at least one article in English about a given death, I’m unlikely to learn about it.

Do I have to cite you?
I’m a secondary source at best, so you’ll probably want to go to the original articles and cite them. Linking to or recommending this site is OK.