He put the firework on his head. He lit it. Happy Fourth.
Devon Staples, 22, of Calais, Maine, placed a commercial reloadable mortar-style fireworks tube on top of his head at a July 4th backyard party and ignited it. Friends said they thought they had talked him out of it. They were wrong by about three seconds. Death was instant. The Maine Office of Chief Medical Examiner confirmed cause and manner.
A backyard in Calais, a summer night, a tube of powder
At approximately 10 p.m. on the night of July 4, 2015, Devon Staples was at a friend’s backyard on South Street in Calais, Maine — a small city of roughly 3,000 people on the Canadian border, 90 miles east of Bangor. The party had the usual Fourth of July components: friends, summer heat, alcohol, and consumer fireworks.
The firework in question was a reloadable mortar tube — the kind sold legally in consumer fireworks stores and pop-up roadside tents across the country every June. You drop a shell into the tube, set it on the ground pointing skyward, and light the fuse. The shell travels up the tube, exits at velocity, arcs into the sky, and detonates. That is the full and complete set of instructions. It is printed on the tube.
Staples placed the tube on his head. He then lit it.
Friends gathered. Friends objected. Friends thought they’d won.
According to Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland — who spoke to reporters citing police and witness accounts — when Staples suggested he was going to put the mortar tube on his head, his friends gathered around him. They tried to talk him out of it. McCausland said the friends believed they had succeeded: they thought they had convinced him to stop.
Before they could react, Staples ignited the firework. He was killed instantly by the resulting blunt force trauma. His brother Cody Staples, 25, was only a few feet away.
The Maine Office of Chief Medical Examiner confirmed the cause and manner of death as accidental — a designation that reflects the absence of suicidal intent, not the absence of spectacular self-inflicted decision-making.
“I was the first one who got there. There was no rushing him to the hospital. There was no Devon left when I got there.”
Cody Staples, brother of Devon Staples — quoted by AP, July 2015
“He thought it was a dud”
In the days following the incident, Staples’ family offered a competing account. His father told the Sun Journal that Devon believed the mortar tube contained a dud shell — a firework that had already been spent or failed to load. His mother told CBS News the same thing. His brother Cody told AP that Devon was “not the kind of person who did stupid things” and that “this was a terrible accident.”
The dud-shell theory does not resolve the underlying problem. If you believe a mortar tube contains a spent shell, the indicated action is to set it on the ground and leave it alone — not to place it on your head. Even a hypothetically empty tube placed over the head and ignited would be dangerous. The explosive force that propels a live shell is sufficient to cause catastrophic injury when directed at point-blank range into a skull rather than open air.
Whether Staples believed the shell was inert or not, the outcome was the same. The tube was loaded. The fuse was lit. He was not.
“Devon was not the kind of person who did stupid things. This was a terrible accident.”
Cody Staples, brother — quoted by AP, July 2015
Gaston. Goofy. Gone.
Devon Staples was not a reckless nobody. He was a former Disney World character performer who had played Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and Goofy at Walt Disney World in Florida. He was 22, physically fit enough to carry those costumes in Florida summer heat, and — by all family accounts — gregarious and well-liked. He had come home to Maine for the holiday.
The Disney background became a prominent detail in coverage because it created narrative friction: the man who played a cartoon strongman died in a way a cartoon strongman would never die. Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Entertainment Weekly all picked up the story specifically because of the Disney connection.
None of that made the physics different. Consumer mortar shells do not care about your resume.
What a reloadable mortar tube actually does
A reloadable mortar tube is a consumer fireworks product consisting of a thick cylindrical tube, typically 1.5 to 3 inches in diameter and 8 to 12 inches long, designed to be placed vertically on the ground. A pyrotechnic shell is dropped in from the top. The fuse is lit. A small lift charge in the base of the shell ignites, generating rapidly expanding gas that propels the shell upward at high velocity — typically 100 to 150 feet into the air — whereupon a second timed charge detonates the burst payload to produce the aerial display.
The lift charge generates enough force to send a multi-ounce pyrotechnic shell to the top of a 15-story building. When that force is directed downward into a human skull rather than upward into open air, it does not produce an aerial display.
The tube’s packaging carries explicit warnings: do not hold in hand, do not point at people, place on ground before igniting. Staples placed the tube on his head. He held a lighter in his hand. He lit the fuse. He had, in sequence, violated every applicable warning while adding a new one the label had not anticipated: do not place on head.
A family’s grief, and a state’s three-year-old fireworks law
In the days following Staples’ death, his family told the Bangor Daily News they were seeking stricter fireworks regulations in Maine. The state had only legalized consumer fireworks in 2012 after a long prohibition, and the fatality reignited — so to speak — debate about whether the law had been a mistake.
Maine fireworks law does not prohibit putting a mortar tube on your head, because no law anticipated that. The prohibition on holding consumer fireworks by hand — which exists in most state codes and on every product label — does not extend to placing them on top of the skull because that scenario had not previously required articulation.
The family’s legislative advocacy is not the punchline here. Grief does not require irony. Staples’ mother and father lost their son. Cody Staples watched it happen from a few feet away. That is the actual bottom of this story, beneath all the absurdity.
A certificate in applied physics, awarded posthumously
The Darwin Awards, named for Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, recognize individuals who remove themselves from the gene pool through spectacularly self-inflicted means, thereby — in the theory’s framework — improving the overall odds for everyone else. Devon Staples meets the criteria in full.
The defining feature of a genuine Darwin Award case is not malice or recklessness in the conventional sense — it is the overriding of all available corrective signals. Staples had friends trying to stop him. He had a product label telling him not to do this. He had ten thousand years of human intuition about pointing explosive devices away from your body. He neutralized all of it with a single confident decision at 10 p.m. on the Fourth of July.
We do not mock Devon Staples. We document him. There is a difference, and it matters. The record exists so that the next person who picks up a mortar tube at a summer party might, at some level, remember that the label means what it says.
“Natural selection doesn't always finish the job. But it always files a report.”
Darwin Awards editorial board