One of the four was 28 and died in his sleep. Physicians will tell you that for a young person to die in their sleep is extremely rate.
Extremely rare, as in, well-established if poorly understood syndrome with a frequency of just over one per mille in the USA. Which, with 7.5 thousand “friends” in its address book, would include several.
Of course, the sampling here is far from representative - being the contact list of a sales executive, it certainly would skew towards a higher age and especially would exclude teenagers and younger adults who died before they could be added to the list.
(It is also notably uneven in distribution, by far most common among certain populations from South East Asia, such as Hmong refugees from the Khmer Rouge and ther descendants.)
So yes, unlikely things happen, especially if you cast the dies an absurd number of times.
This means when he heard of the death, he would react as “wow, that was totally unexpected.” So someone who is involved in a traffic accident isn’t unexpected because accidents happen. Someone who has a long history of heart disease who dies from heart disease isn’t unexpected. Someone who is very old dying from natural causes or an accident isn’t unexpected. An unexpected death means the person was fine the day before they died and then, was dead the next day. For example, a 20 year old who is totally fit dies in his sleep. Or a 40 year old develops a “turbo cancer” and dies a couple of months later.
What an impressively imprecise, arbitrary and subjective criterion. The last one is particularly notable seeing as we have every reason to believe that Bonnar experienced a shift in perception making him primed to label deaths within the set in question as suspicious. Did he log his reaction to the death of everyone he knew who died, including the time before Covid-19, or is this relying purely on his recollection? Also, seeing how loosely “friend” is defined here and how Bonnar is not in any position that would give him any insider knowledge about their medical history, as well as how there is nothing indicating that he has any relevant expertise, how much weight can we really give to his judgement on plausibility here?
Jay is the very first person I’ve talked to who personally knew more than 10 people who died unexpectedly and who was willing to disclose their names so that third party fact-checkers could verify the information was true. This makes his story unique. So Jay wasn’t cherry picked from thousands of anecdotes. He was simply the first person who spoke to me who had a large enough sample to be statistically interesting and who could reveal names so that his story could be verified.
I do not think you know what “cherry-picking” means - you certainly did admit that he was an outlier within a self-selecting group.