It sounds utterly impossible: A New York City man jumps 39 stories from the roof of an Upper West Side apartment building, slams into a parked car and survives.
"Miracle!" proclaims the New York Daily News.
On Tuesday morning, Thomas Magill, 22, plunged from a West 63rd Street apartment building and crashed at 100 mph into the backseat and trunk of a red Dodge Charger. The impact of the 400 foot drop was so great that Magill's Keds sneakers flew off his feet.
"My leg! My leg!" he reportedly screamed and was taken to St. Lukes hospital where he was upgraded to stable condition after surgery to stop massive internal bleeding and to repair his crushed legs.
"He had his hands up in the air, like flailing," witness Andrew Petrocelli told the Daily News. "Just when he's about to land, there was a boom and glass flying all over," he added. "The car saved his life. He landed in there like a stunt man. It was amazing."
Magill's story may sound like one in a million but it's not especially surprising if you delve into the obscure world of free falling. It turns out that people tumble from great heights all the time and survive... and their chances of survival actually improve if they're drunk, on drugs, suicidal or crazy, according to top experts in the field. Other key survival factors include landing position (Magill hit feet first; head first would have meant instant death) and the cushion or give of the impact surface. (If you're lucky enough to have a choice where you hit, snow happens to be a good landing pad for free-falling.)
Dr. Richard Snyder knows more than anyone in the world about free falling and "human impact tolerances," the technical phrase for how much the body can withstand. Over a fifty-year career, he has researched more than thirty-three thousand falls of every height and variety.
As a crash injury expert at the FAA in 1963, Snyder published a classic study of 137 falls, including a sixty-nine year-old woman who toppled from a tree while chasing her pet parakeet and an eloper who tumbled from a tall ladder. Snyder's subjects ranged in age from eighteen months to ninety-one years old. Humans, he concluded, are able to survive impact forces "considerably greater than those previously believed tolerable." This is a super crazy story i think itsawsome how survived!
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