In the same week as a teenager who was injured at a mall by a falling suicide jumper, bodies are also flying in Russia and China in an expanding area of body torts. In Russia, a man repeatedly through himself out of a high window without success while in China a teenager was hit by a flying corpse.

As noted by one of my former students, I do collect falling body cases as part of my torts class (cases of injuries caused by falling bodies of both the animal and human variety). This macabre collection shows how torts often deals with the bizarre and unpredictable aspects of life from cows failing through ceilings to dead men dropping from airplanes. This week has had a bumper crop of body cases.

First, there is Alexei Roskov who drank heavily in his fifth floor apartment and decided (with his wife watching) to end it. He jumped out of their kitchen window, only to their mutual amazement to survive. He stumbled back up to the apartment after his wife had called an ambulance with barely a scratch. His wife then started to yell at him for his drinking and his attempted suicide, so Roskov jumped a second time — only to survive again. He simply stated: “I have no idea why I jumped the first time but when I came back up and I heard my wife screaming angrily at me I thought it was best if I left the room again – out of the window.”

In the meantime, student Wu Dan, 16, was riding home on his bike when a corpse of a dead woman came flying from a car and hit him. Police speculate that the women was the victim of an earlier car accident and was being dumped in Dongyang, China.

For the Chinese story, click here.

For the Russian story, click here.