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Suicide fail sees man plunge nine storeys and survive
Author of the article:Liz Braun
Publishing date:Oct 08, 2021


The “ultimate driving machine” has also proved to be the ultimate life-saver.

A parked BMW broke the fall of a 31 year old man who jumped out a ninth storey window of a New Jersey building — and survived.

The man landed on the car, smashing through the roof and causing the rear window to explode and send a thousand bits of glass into the street.To the astonishment of onlookers, the man then crawled out of the destroyed car to ask, “What happened?”

One arm was obviously broken, according to eyewitnesses, and he was screaming in pain and bloodied, but miraculously alive.

An eyewitness to the 100 foot fall told the New York Post, “I heard a big boom and I didn’t think it was a person at first.”

Christina Smith, 21, saw the man plummet from the high-rise building at 26 Journal Square.

“Then the man jumped out of the car and threw himself on the ground screaming, ‘What just happened?’ and asking for help. I was trying to calm him down because his arm was broken very badly. I recorded the scene and I was in disbelief because I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Smith said the whole event felt like being in a movie.

She and other passersby kept the man, who has not been named, quiet and still until an ambulance arrived. He was taken to hospital in critical condition.

His jump is believed to have been a suicide attempt.

“He was trying to get up but people were trying to get him to stay down. ‘You don’t know how hurt you are.’ So he stayed there until the police and ambulances came,” said Mark Bordeaux, 50, who works in the building and saw the aftermath.

“He kept saying, ‘Leave me alone, I want to die.’ You saw one of his arms was clearly broken, but he was conscious, he was moving.

“He wanted to die. That was his agenda. But God had something else in mind.”

It’s almost impossible to survive a fall of 100 feet, but it has happened in the past. A 16 year old jumper from the Golden Gate bridge survived her own suicide attempt in 2011, and in 2013, a British man fell from the 15th floor of a building in New Zealand and lived to talk about it.

The record for this sort of thing is held by Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant who survived the highest fall ever without a parachute in 1972. She was the sole survivor of a suspected airplane bombing, falling 10,160 metres (33,330 feet) into dense, snowy woods in the mountains of Czechoslovakia.