The popular lawyer’s death has been immortalised on TV shows such as MythBusters and 1000 Ways to Die, but the true story behind this legend is even stranger than fiction
To this day, nobody quite understands what compelled 39-year-old Garry Hoy to throw himself at the 24th-floor window of a Toronto skyscraper.
Local paper the Torontoist wrote: “We can never know what motivated Hoy: a desire to prove the robustness of modern construction techniques, whimsy, or just simply showing off.”
The move had apparently been a popular party trick by the eccentric 39-year-old, one of his firm’s “best and brightest” lawyers, who had developed a strange obsession with “the tensile strength of office building windows” and had conducted his risky stunt before.
On the day of the accident, July 9, 1993, he was touring a group of law students around the firm offices.
Apparently bragging about the unbreakability of the Toronto-Dominion Center’s windows, or maybe just joking about the window being tough to open on such a hot day, he ran shoulder-first and full-speed into the windowpane to the bone-deep shock of onlookers.
Luckily, Garry, as usual, bounced anti-climatically back off. But seemingly invigorated by the stunned reactions and trusted sturdiness of the glass, he gave it another go.
On his second charge, the window – without shattering, as Garry had promised – popped clean out of its sockets and tumbled 24 storeys to the courtyard below, where he died upon impact.
What had made Garry so fond of flexing the strength of his place of employment’s windows is unclear.
But as structural engineer Bob Greer said of the ill-fated case: “I don’t know of any building code in the world that would allow a 160-pound man to run up against a glass and withstand it.”
Garry’s death sent ripples through Toronto’s legal world.
Just three years after his death, Holden Day Wilson LLP, which had been one of Toronto’s biggest law firms while Garry was alive, controversially shut up shop, leaving behind unpaid bills and owing compensation. It was apparently unable to recover from the gap the popular lawyer had left behind.
Today, Garry’s beloved building in the Canadian city still dominates the skyline.
In 2005, Prince Edward unveiled an Ontario Heritage Trust plaque at its base, recognising the tower’s “outstanding architecture” and beautiful “bronze-coloured glass”.
The building, like Garry, has also become something of an on-screen star since. In 2000, the lobbies of two adjoining towers were used as filming locations for the psychological thriller American Psycho , another grim story of an eccentric associate who has seemingly lost his mind.
