I'm ready to believe Terry is really gone, but I think it's likely we will never be able to put to rest the lingering details of the circumstances surrounding his death. I just can't believe Terry would kill himself. He didn't seem suicidal in his last video, and it seems completely antithetical to everything he has ever said. He expressed some semblance of doubt in his own status as king, which is rather out of the ordinary, but suicide seems a bit of an overreaction. Unless every one of Terry's delusions got pulled out from under him in one afternoon, I guess that could be very overwhelming... I think something that disturbs people about his death is the idea that he might have lost his omnipresent self-confidence in his final hours. He always rationalized about how living homeless is righteous and how God wants life to be dangerous and exciting though, so why would he lose faith in this? No matter how bad his life on the streets got (and it wasn't particularly bad as far as I can tell; there was a church giving him food, and he had Internet access at the library), that wouldn't be a reason for him to think God abandoned him. People like to say that he could have not noticed the train "because of his mental illness", but that still doesn't seem right. If anything, schizophrenia would make him more alert and paranoid to things like, oh I don't know, hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel and freight rolling toward him. I wouldn't describe Terry as idle-minded, spaced out, unresponsive, or anything like that in any of his videos; incoherent, sure, but he's always been alert. I'm not sure exactly what to think.
Some might take these inconsistencies to mean that Terry isn't dead at all, but I think the overall proof is becoming insurmountable. The big reason there's so much confusion is because the news first broke via a private facebook post that only got out because of TheTemple's illegal and highly immoral impersonation/hijacking of Terry's facebook. It's clear at this point he told some white lies to avoid getting in serious trouble, but that's all only tangential to the increasingly undeniable evidence of his death. On top of that, nobody seems able to formulate a concrete hypothesis for how exactly all these lies are being coordinated. No amount of police reports, facebook posts, obituaries, or newspaper articles will convince you, because they can all be theoretically faked, assuming the perpetrators are willing, able, and (this one's important) motivated to impersonate and/or completely dupe these entities. TheTemple's shady actions have unrealistically heightened your standard for evidence, it seems. Even if that reporter at The Dalles Chronicle were to somehow be convinced that the paranoia of a group of (I'm using this term correctly and non-derogatorily) conspiracy theorists on the Internet is worth her time to go get a physical copy of the police report, scan it, and print it in the paper, you'd still have to pay $5 to read the article yourself in order to dispel any worries that user might have doctored the screencap he posts here. And even then, I bet a few of you would then move the goalpost, saying that the reporter is in on the lie. That's all fine, but understand that you will likely never have any degree of closure about this.
Personally, I think the proof of death we have now is adequate enough for my skepticism. But as I said earlier, I wish we could know why he got hit by that train for sure. If we had the video, it would make everything more clear to everybody. Maybe a disgruntled Union Pacific worker would leak the video for the right price. The question is then of how much money your autism will command to see our favorite homeless king be eviscerated by a train.
