63-Year-Old Woman Dies After Family Fight During Thanksgiving Weekend

A family enjoys Thanksgiving turkey in a file photo. (John Moore/Getty Images)

A 22-year-old woman is facing charges after a domestic dispute in Massachusetts turned deadly during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Modesta Gomez was scheduled to appear before a judge on charges of assault and battery on a person over 60 and assault and battery on another person.

Gomez became embroiled in a family brawl late on Nov. 25 at her family’s house on in Methuen. The person who tried to stop the fight apparently died.

Police officers were called to the home after receiving reports of a fight and an unresponsive woman. When they arrived, they found Martina Gomez. She “appeared to suffer from medical distress” while trying to break up the family brawl, Carrie Kimball-Monahan, a spokeswoman for the Essex District Attorney’s Office, wrote in an email to the New York Post.

The Martina Gomez was rushed to Lawrence General Hospital and was pronounced dead there; an autopsy on Monday was going to determine the cause of her death.

The identity of the second person Modesta Gomez allegedly assaulted hasn’t been released, reported Boston 25. It’s also not clear how Modesta Gomez and Martina Gomez are related.

Death Rates Spike on Thanksgiving

Death rates spike in the United States on Thanksgiving and the high rates continue through December, reported Forbes, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The major culprits are car accidents, with nearly 50,000 nonfatal car accidents and 764 fatal crashes during Thanksgiving 2012, and coronary events.

Researchers said that deaths due to coronary disease in Los Angeles County routinely spiked around Thanksgiving.

The higher risk of heart attacks starting on Thanksgiving “could be related to such behavioral changes around the holiday time as increased food, salt, and alcohol consumption,” author Dr. Robert Kloner and his colleagues said in an influential 1999 journal article.

“The emotional and psychological stresses of the holidays might also contribute,” the article also stated.

Overeating Triggers Heart Attacks

According to a 2000 study from the American Heart Association, meals that are unusually large increase the risk of heart attack by about four times within two hours of eating. Overeating could trigger a heart attack, in much the same way extreme physical exertion or outbursts of anger can trigger an attack.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that overeating by itself has been shown to increase the risk of heart attacks,” lead author Francisco Lopez-Jimenez, a cardiology fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a statement.

“We hope that the results of our study will help convince people to be more cautious about eating exceptionally heavy meals, especially for people who have coronary artery disease or have suffered a previous heart attack,” he continued.

Dr. David Agus told CBS that overeating and food that isn’t properly cooked are two factors in health risk on Thanksgiving.

“It’s a lot. People forget their pills when they travel. They eat a lot of food, which shuns the blood to the stomach and then they try to do too much—playing football in the yard—and it causes problems,” he said. “They get stressed over the family issues and other things going on. So for all those reasons, you’ve got to be aware.”