7. Extreme Demonstration Leads to Extremely Fatal Result
As a Toronto Police detective described how Garry Hoy’s last demonstration of his office windows’ sturdiness came to an unfortunate end: “At this Friday night party, Mr. Hoy did it again and bounced off the glass the first time. However, he did it a second time, and this time crashed right through the middle of the glass“. He fell to his death 24 floors below. He need not have died, if he had left window tensile strength testing to the experts.
As a structural engineer told the Toronto Star: “I don’t know of any building code in the world that would allow a 160-pound man to run up against a glass window and withstand it“. Hoy’s auto-defenestration made the obscure lawyer a greater celebrity in death than he had ever been in life. His unusual demise became the basis for urban legends that were actually based on a true factual foundation. His death was featured in episodes of the TV shows Mythbusters and 1000 Ways to Die, garnered him entries in Snopes and Wikipedia, and earned him a 1996 Darwin Award.
