Gary Hoy (1955 – 1993) was a Canadian lawyer and a respected senior partner at a Toronto law firm. Before going to law school, Hoy had gotten a degree in engineering, 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 the windows’ sturdiness by body checking them. As things turned out, and as he discovered on July 9th, 1993, it was an ill-advised habit.
An Unhealthy Fixation on Window Strength
That evening, Hoy attended a welcome party for a group of incoming law student summer interns, in a conference room on the 24th floor of the high rise. Hoy wanted to impress the interns with the office windows’ strength, and decided to demonstrate to the newbies that they were unbreakable by throwing himself at a glass wall. He was unaware that he had long been a fugitive from the law of averages, and that the law was about to catch up with him.
Hoy had thrown himself at the glass wall many times before, and always ended up bouncing off harmlessly. Not so this time. As a Toronto police detective described what happened next: “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”. Gary Hoy fell to his death 24 floors below.
Hoy Did Not Understand High Rise Window as Well as He Thought He Did
Hoy was the kind of person who knows something about a subject, but not as much as he thought. His unfortunate death could have been averted if he had left window tensile strength testing to the experts. As a structural engineer told the Toronto Star about Hoy’s peculiar methodology in the aftermath of the fatal mishap: “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 law partner a greater celebrity in death than he had ever been in life. His weird death became the basis for sundry urban legends that were actually based on a true factual foundation. Hoy’s bizarre demise was featured in episodes of the TV shows Mythbusters and 1000 Ways to Die. It also garnered him entries in Snopes and Wikipedia, and won him a 1996 Darwin Award.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
History Halls – Deaths You’ll Go to Hell for Laughing At: Franz Reichelt
Snopes – Did a Man Die Demonstrating a Window’s Strength?
Torontoist – Urban Legends: The Leaping Lawyer of Bay Street
