What about the other 6,399 people who died on Tuesday (on average)...

For the record, i had no clue who Heath Ledger was. I will now crawl back under my rock.

Oh, and this will be a recurring theme: google and the internet are simply amazing tools, and even more amazing is that someone else foots the bill for all of us to use them. You can google "daily mortality rate" and poof: on average, 6,400 people die each day in the US.