truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Last year, Stephanie Grissom, driving 71 mph in a 55-mph zone, accidentally struck and killed a Howard County, Md., traffic officer when he stepped onto the highway to motion for her to pull over. In May 2008, the case was closed, with Grissom fined $310 and three points on her record.

A 13-year-old skateboarder was killed in May at a railroad crossing in O'Fallon, Ill., when (according to police) he was unsuccessful in beating a train to the crossing.

In April in Marion, Ill., an alert newspaper carrier discovered an 84-year-old woman who was alive but had been pinned to the floor for four days without food or water because her much larger husband, 77, had died of a heart attack and fallen on top of her. (In a notorious 1984 incident at a strip club in San Francisco, a dancer had been pinned down overnight underneath the body of club manager Jimmy Ferrozzo, who had had a fatal heart attack while having sex with her. She could not move because they were lying on top of a stage piano that descended on a pulley, for the dancer's grand entrance, and Ferrozzo, in the throes of ecstasy, had accidentally tripped the switch sending it back up, where it jammed against the ceiling.)

In a well-publicized story in January, two New York City men were charged with fraud after they rolled a dead friend's body in a chair from their apartment to a check-cashing store, propping him up to suggest that he was alive and wanted the men to cash his Social Security check for him. In May, a judge set the men free after they told him that the three had an income- and expense-sharing arrangement and that they thought their friend was merely incapacitated. Since the autopsy was inconclusive as to time of death, the charges were dropped.

Sonny Graham of Hilton Head, S.C., committed suicide in April after having spent 13 years with the transplanted heart of suicide victim Terry Cottle. The cellular implication is somewhat less likely, though, because Graham's widow was the same woman who was married to Cottle at the time of his suicide.

Two men who stole a kayak and went joyriding on Moon Lake near New Port Richey, Fla., drowned when the boat capsized (March).