Batman’s uppercut kills a man

It's a pretty well-known fact at this point that Batman doesn't kill people. But when someone you love suddenly dies from causes unexplained, he becomes the hero that family needs. Or something like that.

Point being, when 31-year-old Stephen Merrill passed away on February 12, 2015, his family needed something for the official cause of his death for the funeral home and his obituary. The only logical explanation for his passing, of course, being "a uppercut from Batman."

No, that's not a mistake. It definitely wasn't the cause, but as his fiancée, Stephanie Vella, explained, "He would have been honored to have died by an uppercut from Batman."

“Everyone was starting to get a little tense. We didn’t have a cause of death but we were told we had to have one,” said Merrill's close friend Brandon Moxam. "I made a joke. Say the cause of death was an 'uppercut from Batman.'"

The family decided to go with that, and although the newspaper wasn't originally going to publish it, another of Merrill's close friends, Andrew Albreacht, called them and explained how much it meant to the family to have a more lighthearted obituary.

So I guess the lesson in all of this is.. Batman is awesome?

[WFTS Tampa Bay]