How did Eric Boehlert die?

[Effete Snob]

198. My hypothesis

Is that there are far more obvious, common, and likely reasons for a cyclist to get hit by a train, than it is for assassins to plan to find a specific cyclist who is out for a ride, and then somehow manage to catch that cyclist and put him into the path of a train against his will, and with confidence they would not be observed.

I can think of a lot of hypotheses about how a train might hit a cyclist. There are a lot of ways that could, and DOES happen.

But I'll be danged if I can envision how this works as an assassination technique.

There are umpteen dozen unsolved fatal shootings in the greater Northern NJ area. If you want to kill someone, it's best to go with something simple, reliable, and relatively foolproof.

But the bad guys in some people's imaginations act like Jame Bond villains. Nobody ever just shoots him. Nope. They have to capture him, explain their plan, set up some Rube Goldberg technique for doing him in, and then leave him alone.

So, no, you can't just steal a car and run him down. You have to somehow manage to catch him and his bike, and position them in front of a train so that they stay there while you get out of the way, and just hope nobody's around to watch or that the train has a camera, etc.. What possible sense does that make?

And the plan here starts with "Find him out on his bike at around 9:40PM." Like, just explain how that part works.

And, remember, they had to time this pretty close to when the train would be arriving at that intersection. So, they have to work out his being there with the train arriving shortly. They can't just leave him there too long before someone would notice.