Jumping out of windows

Jumping out of a window is the act of jumping, propelling oneself, or causing oneself to fall, out of a window. This phenomenon played a notable role in such events as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, 9/11, and other disasters; it is also a method of suicide.

There is also an urban legend that Wall Street investors jumped out of windows during the 1929 stock market crash .

In United States, jumping (whether out of a window, off a cliff, or from some other location) is among the least common methods of committing suicide (typically less than 2% of all reported suicides in the United States for 2005).

In Hong Kong, jumping is the most common method (from any location) of committing suicide, accounting for 52.1% of all reported suicide cases in 2006, and similar rates for the years prior to that. Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong believes that it may be due to the abundance of easily accessible high rise buildings in Hong Kong (implying that much of the jumping is out of windows).

Some consider jumping out of windows to be an act of self-defenestration.

Notable acts in history involving the jumping of people out of windows

• The Revolutions of 1848 led to unrest in the German states. When an agitated crowd forced their way into the town hall in Cologne on March 3, two city councillors panicked and jumped out of the window; one of them broke both his legs. The event went down in the city’s history as the "Cologne Defenestration" .
• In 1911, during the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, numerous fatalities were people who leapt or fell out of windows to their death.
• In 1941, Murder, Inc informant Abe "Kid Twist" Reles fell to his death from a window on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island, on the eve of his scheduled testimony. The angle of trajectory suggests that he was defenestrated rather than trying to flee.
• On March 10 1948 the Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs Jan Masaryk was found dead, dressed in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation stated that he committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although some believe that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists (see Czech coup).
• On September 11, 2001, the September 11 attacks caused several office workers to jump or fall from windows, choosing to die from the fall rather than the explosions inside the building. Some of the falls were broadcast on the news (see The Falling Man).

Jumping out of a window in fiction

• In 1926, American writer Nella Larsen ended her novel Passing with a person leaving a building via a window; whether this is a defenestration and/or an act of jumping out of a window depends on one's interpretation of the novel's characters and events.
• In 1997, Brian Goggin and a team of artists create an absurdist site-specific art installation on two sides of an empty four-story building at the corner of Sixth and Howard Streets in San Francisco entitled Defenestration, which depicted seemingly animated furniture apparently leaping out the windows and off the parapet.
• In the novel Vineland, the opening chapters detail Zoyd Wheeler's self-defenestration, an annual event he re-enacts to retain his public benefit.
• In the Original English-Language Manga Series Miki Falls in the 4th, and final book entitled "Miki Falls: Winter" the main character, Miki, throws herself out a 3rd story window. The scene is also shown in the beginning of the 1st book "Miki Falls: Spring" but the reason why she is jumping is not given, only that she blacks out and has a flashback, from which most of the story is told.

See also

• Defenestration