at
Jezreel, by
Gustave Doré • Around the 9th century BC, Queen
Jezebel was defenestrated by her own eunuch servants, at the urging of
Jehu, according to the
Hebrew Bible. () • Several chronicles (notably the Annals of Westhide Abbey) note that
King John killed his nephew,
Arthur of Brittany, by defenestration from the castle at
Rouen,
France, in 1203. • In 1378, the crafts and their leader
Wouter van der Leyen occupied the
Leuven city hall and seized the Leuven government. Most of the patricians left the city and fled to
Aarschot. After negotiations between the parties, they agreed to share the government. The patricians did not accept this easily, as it caused them to lose their absolute power. In an attempt to regain absolute control, they had Wouter Van der Leyen assassinated in
Brussels. Seeking revenge, the crafts handed over the patricians to a furious crowd. The crowd stormed the city hall and defenestrated the patricians. At least 15 patricians were killed. of
Lisbon D. Martinho de
Zamora is thrown by the revolted populace from the cathedral's bell tower, as depicted by
Roque Gameiro, in 1904. • In 1383, to celebrate the
acclamation of King
John I of Portugal, all churches of the realm were ordered to ring their bells. However, upon the lack of any ringing coming from the
capital's cathedral the populace of
Lisbon revolted and rammed their way inside the building.
Bishop Dom Martinho of
Zamora was accused of treason by the populace for being
Castilian and supporting
Antipope Clement VII and was, therefore, defenestrated from one of the bell towers. His corpse was assaulted and dragged to
Rossio Square, where it was left to rot and be eaten by dogs, until the populace had enough of its smell and buried it in the square. • In 1419, In the
First Defenestration of Prague, a judge, the burgomaster, and some thirteen members of the
town council of the
New Town of Prague were defenestrated by a
Hussite mob. • In 1452, King
James II of Scotland murdered
William Douglas, 8th Earl of Douglas, with his own hands and defenestrated him at
Stirling Castle. • On April 26, 1478, after the failure of the
Pazzi conspiracy to murder the ruler of
Florence,
Lorenzo de' Medici,
Jacopo de' Pazzi was defenestrated. • In 1483,
Prague's Old-Town
portreeve and the bodies of seven murdered New-Town
aldermen were defenestrated. 's impression of the
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre • On May 16, 1562,
Adham Khan,
Akbar's general and foster brother, was defenestrated twice for murdering a rival general,
Ataga Khan, who had been recently promoted by Akbar. Akbar was woken up in the tumult after the murder. He struck Adham Khan down personally with his fist and immediately ordered his defenestration by royal order. The first time, his legs were broken as a result of the fall from the ramparts of
Agra Fort but he remained alive. Akbar, in a rare act of cruelty probably exacerbated by his anger at the loss of his favorite general, ordered his defenestration a second time, killing him. Adham Khan had wrongly counted on the influence of his mother and Akbar's wet nurse,
Maham Anga, to save him as she was almost an unofficial regent in the days of Akbar's youth. Akbar personally informed Maham Anga of her son's death, to which she famously commented, "You have done well." She died 40 days later of acute depression. • In 1572,
French King
Charles IX's friend, the
Huguenot leader
Gaspard de Coligny, was killed in accordance with the wishes of Charles' mother,
Catherine de' Medici. Charles allegedly said "then kill them all that no man be left to reproach me". Thousands of Huguenots were killed in the
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre after soldiers attacked Coligny in his house, stabbed him, and defenestrated him. • In 1618, rebel Protestant leaders in Prague
defenestrate two Catholic Royal regents and their secretary, who survived the fall out of the windows of
Prague Castle. • On December 1, 1640, during the
Portuguese Restoration War, in
Lisbon,
a group of conspirators, who supported the rise of nobleman
John,
8th Duke of Braganza to the
Portuguese throne invaded
Ribeira Palace and found
Miguel de Vasconcelos, the hated Portuguese
Secretary of state of the
Habsburg Philip III, hidden in a closet, shot him and defenestrated him. • On June 27, 1844,
Joseph Smith, founder of the
Latter Day Saint movement, died after being
shot and pushed out a window of the
Carthage Jail in
Carthage, Illinois while attempting to escape a mob. • On June 11, 1903, a group of Serbian army officers murdered and defenestrated
King Alexander and
Queen Draga. • In 1922, Italian politician and writer
Gabriele d'Annunzio was temporarily crippled after falling from a window, possibly pushed by a follower of
Benito Mussolini. • In March to April 1932, in
Ivanovo region of
Soviet Union, due to ration cuts and labor intensification measures, strikes and spontaneous assemblies broke out. Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings with slogans like "Toss the Communists . . . out the window." • On March 10, 1948, the Czechoslovak minister of foreign affairs
Jan Masaryk was found dead in his pyjamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation stated that he took his own life by jumping out of the window, although some believe that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists. A 2004 police investigation into his death concluded that, contrary to the initial ruling, he did not die by suicide, but was defenestrated, most likely by
Czechoslovak communists and their Soviet
NKVD advisers for his opposition to the
February 1948 Communist putsch. • On May 22, 1949, while a patient at
Bethesda Naval Hospital,
James Forrestal, the first US Secretary of Defense, died by an alleged suicide from fatal injuries sustained after falling out of a sixteenth-floor window. • On November 28, 1953, the U.S. biological warfare specialist
Frank Olson died after a fall from a hotel window that has been suggested to have been an assassination by the
CIA. • On May 29, 1960, the Turkish physician and politician
Namık Gedik who served as the
minister of interior during the mid-1950s, died by suicide throwing himself out of a window in Ankara when he was in custody. prior to his execution in 1963. • On April 15, 1966, two suspects in the so-called
Bathroom Coup in
Sri Lanka, Corporal Tilekawardene and L. V. Podiappuhamy (otherwise known as Dodampe Mudalali), were said by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to have jumped to their deaths from the fourth floor of the CID building in the Fort. At the inquest, following receipt of new evidence, the magistrate altered the verdict of suicide to one of
culpable homicide. The remainder of the suspects were acquitted. • In 1968, the son of China's future
paramount leader Deng Xiaoping,
Deng Pufang, was thrown from a window by
Red Guards during the
Cultural Revolution. He survived, but become paralyzed. • In 1969, Italian
Anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli was seen falling to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station after being arrested because of claims of his involvement in the
Piazza Fontana bombing, of which he was later cleared. • On March 5, 1969,
Atanasio Ndongo Miyone, the Foreign Minister of
Equatorial Guinea, fell from a window at the Presidential Palace. While the official account claims this was a suicide attempt, he is widely considered to have been forcibly defenestrated. He died of his wounds on March 26. • In 1970,
Turkish idealist student
Ertuğrul Dursun Önkuzu was defenestrated from the third floor of a school by a group of
left-wing students in Ankara. • In 1977, as a result of political backlash against her son
Fela Kuti's album
Zombie,
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti was thrown from a second-story window during a military raid by one thousand Nigerian soldiers on Kuti's compound, the
Kalakuta Republic. The injuries sustained from the fall led Ransome-Kuti to lapse into a coma; she would remain in a coma for more than a year, and eventually succumb to her injuries on 13 April 1978. Ransome-Kuti's death would be commemorated in her son's protest song "Coffin for Head of State". • The
2000 Ramallah lynching included throwing the (already-dead) body of either Vadim Nurzhitz or Yossi Avrahami out of a second-floor window, after those two Israeli soldiers had been lynched. • On March 2, 2007, Russian
investigative journalist Ivan Safronov, who was researching the Kremlin's covert arms deals, fell to his death from a fifth floor window. Friends and colleagues discounted suicide as a reason, and an investigation was opened looking into possible "incitement to suicide". • In 2007 in Gaza, gunmen allegedly affiliated with
Hamas killed a
Fatah supporter by defenestration, an act repeated the next day when a Hamas supporter was defenestrated by alleged supporters of Fatah. • In 2017, retired French physician and teacher Sarah Halimi
was killed in an attack on her home near Paris that ended with her being pushed from a third-floor window. Her death was widely perceived as an example of
Islamist terrorism and
antisemitism. Her assailant was ruled to be not criminally responsible due to having committed the act in a
psychotic episode brought on by his heavy use of
cannabis. • On September 1, 2022,
Ravil Maganov, a Russian businessman who criticized the country's
invasion of Ukraine, died after falling from a window of
a hospital in Moscow on the same day the hospital was visited by Russian president
Vladimir Putin. Some people who knew Maganov well said his death was unlikely to have been a suicide, and some media hypothesized a connection with various other
suspicious deaths of Russian businesspeople occurring around the same time. • In October 2024, Mikhail Rogachev, a Russian businessman and former vice president of
Yukos, was found dead after falling out of the window of his apartment building.
Notable autodefenestrations Autodefenestration (or
self-defenestration) is the term used for the act of
jumping, propelling oneself, or causing oneself to fall, out of a window. • In the
Acts of the Apostles in the
New Testament, the accidental autodefenestration of a young man of
Troas named
Eutychus is recorded. The
Apostle Paul was travelling to
Jerusalem and had stopped for seven days in Troas. While Paul was preaching in a third-story room late on a Sunday night to the local assembly of Christian believers, Eutychus drifted off to sleep and fell out of the window in which he was sitting. The text indicates that Eutychus did not survive but was brought back to life after Paul embraced him. () • In December 1840,
Abraham Lincoln and four other Illinois legislators jumped out of a window in a political maneuver designed to prevent a
quorum on a vote that would have eliminated the Illinois State Bank. • During the
Revolutions of 1848, an agitated crowd forced their way into the town hall in
Cologne and two city councilors 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 1961, while being arrested by communist secret service Polish activist
Henryk Holland jumped out of window, which led to his death. This event was then widely discussed by dissidents and theories of a possible murder were popular. • In 1991, British informer
Martin McGartland was abducted by members of the
Provisional IRA. As he waited to be interrogated, McGartland escaped the IRA by jumping from a third floor window in a
Twinbrook flat where he was taken for interrogation following his abduction, and survived the fall. • On July 9, 1993, the prominent
Toronto attorney
Garry Hoy fell from a 24th story window in an attempt to demonstrate to a group of new legal interns that the windows of the city's
Toronto-Dominion Centre were unbreakable. He performed the same stunt on several previous occasions – dramatically slamming his body against the window – but this time it popped out of its frame and he fell to his death. The accident was commemorated by a 1996
Darwin Award and has been re-enacted in several films and television shows. • In 1995, the French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze jumped from his Paris apartment to his death. • In 1999, popular German Schlager singer
Rex Gildo took his own life by jumping out of the window of his apartment building. • In 2001, at least
104 people jumped out of the
Twin Towers on
9/11. == In popular culture ==