Dead man on a motorcycle rides to Internet fame on video

The dead man on a motorcycle was embalmed and mounted on a Honda CBR600 much like this one, and sat there for his three day wake. Flickr photo.

The Dead Man on a Motorcycle, at his own funeral, is not to be confused with “Jesse James is a Dead Man,” the daredevil reality show on Spike TV. But for a while Friday, you could find them in the same search on Google. Jesse James is a Dead Man ended up on in the same search results as the The Dead Man on a Motorcycle because this hell on wheels has all the elements of curiousness and creepiness that a topic needs to flare into an irresistible flash fire for the short attention span of the Internet.

Dead man riding

The dead man on a motorcycle was David Morales Colon, who was killed in a shooting last week in San Juan, Puerto Rico. CNN broke the dead man riding story, reporting that Colon’s family brought his body to the Marin Funeral Home in San Juan, where there is an undertaker with experience executing bizarre embalming projects. Before Colon was murdered, his uncle gave him a street bike that he no doubt enjoyed riding. The funeral home embalmed the body, outfitted it in biker gear and mounted it on Colon’s prize possession, a Honda CBR600. The dead man on a motorcycle stayed on his mount throughout the family’s three-day wake.

Dead man standing

The dead man on a motorcycle isn’t the first creepy casket alternative pulled off by the Marin Funeral Home. First there was the dead man standing. The Associated Press reported that in 2008, before his death, a man who died told his family he wanted to be happy and standing at his own funeral. So undertakers posed him that way. The body of Angel Pantoja Medina, 24 when he died, stood in a corner of his mother’s living room, dressed in a Yankees cap and shades. The dead man was standing for his entire three-day wake.

Embalming is the key

The funeral home owner told CNN that the dead man on a motorcycle and the dead man standing take special skill. The body must be made rigid enough to pose, yet not be too stiff to put in a coffin for burial. “Embalming is the key,” Marin Funeral Home owner Demaris Marin said. “It’s a professional secret.”

As for “Jesse James is a Dead Man,” he just might be, after Sandra Bullock gets done with him.