The Eerie Connection Between Bruce And Brandon Lee's Deaths
On March 30, 1993, Brandon Lee stepped before the cameras, readying himself for the scene in the film The Crow in which his character, Eric Draven, is shot while witnessing the murder and rape of his fiance. It was one of the last scenes to be filmed, giving him a couple of weeks before his April 17 wedding in Mexico. Fellow actor Michael Massee, says The New York Times, fired a prop gun and Brandon Lee fell to the ground. And didn't get up. The prop was supposed to be loaded with a blank, but Lee had been actually shot in the right side of his abdomen. He was rushed to hospital and over the course of five hours received 60 pints of blood in a transfusion, enough to fill five adult men. Lee died the next day.
On April 27, according to History, the D.A. announced the cause of death to be negligence. A police investigation discovered that the gun, which was supposed to be loaded with blanks, had in fact fired a .44 bullet. In film productions, guns are loaded with emptied cartridges that have the bullet, but no gunpowder, for close-up scenes. At other times, the props are loaded with blanks — a charge, but no projectile. In a tragic mistake, the tip of a cartridge had caught inside the gun, and the charge from the blank meant the prop gun effectively fired a live round.
Like father, like son
No one was charged with the accidental shooting.
In addition to the tragedy of a 28-year-old man being killed during production of a film, fans noticed connections to the death of Brandon's father, Bruce Lee. Bruce died almost 20 years previously, in June 1973, due to a cerebral edema. He was 32 years old.
The bigger coincidence, however, is that in Bruce Lee's last film, Game of Death, his character receives a gunshot wound during the filming of a movie within a movie. The tragic coincidences go further: Just as Brandon Lee died before the release of The Crow, Bruce Lee died before the release of Game of Death. In fact, for many people, the similarity between this fictional scene and what really happened helped create a Mandela effect, a situation in which a mass of people believe a false event occurred — in this case, that both Bruce Lee and his son Brandon died due to a gunshot wound received on set. That, of course, is false. Another idea spurred by the similarities is that someone — in this case, the Triads or other members of the Chinese mafia — had ensured that both of them were murdered. There's no evidence to back it up. The deaths of father and son remain a remarkable parallel.