4. A Bright Lawyer’s Idiot Side
Canadian attorney Garry Hoy (1955 – 1993) was a respected senior partner at a Toronto law firm. Before he went to law school, Hoy had been an engineering major, and the robustness of modern building techniques was a subject of particular interest to him. He was peculiarly proud of the tensile strength of the windows at his office in the Toronto Dominion Center, a downtown high rise, and was in the habit of demonstrating their sturdiness by body checking them.
As things turned out, and as he discovered on July 9, 1993, it was an ill-advised habit, worthy of an idiot. That evening, Hoy was at a welcome party for law student interns, in a conference room on high rise’s 24th floor. In a bid to impress the interns with the office windows’ strength, Hoy sought to demonstrate that they were unbreakable by throwing himself at the glass panes. He had done so many a time before and always bounced off harmlessly. Not this time.
