Tragic final moments of man filmed as he fell to his death after driving off Niagara Falls in protest
A stunt performed to raise awareness about homeless went horribly wrong after a man ended up losing his life.
In 1995, Robert Overacker had hoped to perform a stunt over Niagara Falls that consisting of him riding a jet ski over the edge of the Falls and launching a parachute afterwards.
His jet ski bore a sign reading 'Save the Homeless', and his brother and a friend were on-hand to film the daredevil feat.
But the ordeal went horribly wrong, meaning thousands of onlookers saw thrill-seeker Robert plummet to his death.
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Arguably making things worse, the harrowing ordeal was also caught on camera.
As many as 3,000 tourists were present at the Falls when the stunt happened.
Robert, 39, had been riding his own personal jet ski at time. It remains unclear why his rocket-propelled parachute failed to deploy that fateful day.
Robert's body was later recovered 180 feet below Canadian Horseshoe Falls.
He was pronounced dead at Greater Niagara General Hospital an hour after the stunt went wrong.
Speaking after his death, Tom Detenbeck, a parks police dispatcher, compared hitting the water from that height as 'like hitting cement'.
"You’re talking a million gallons of water going over the falls in a second," he went on to say of the force of the Falls.
The stunt school graduate was said to have been planning the stunt for seven years, Los Angeles Times reported.
He'd tried to do it on two previous occasions, but his friends managed to talk him out of it.
Robert was survived by his wife Laurie Overacker. The couple didn't have any children at the time of his passing.
A video of the harrowing incident was uploaded to YouTube in 2014 where one witness came forward and shared their own memories of the sad day.
"I watched this from the balcony of the Fallsview Sheraton," they wrote in 2020. "It was the morning after a wedding spent at the hotel...the few of us were shaking off cobwebs from the night before and watched this incredulously as it happened."
The onlooker continued: "I turned to my friends after watching this and muttered something about never drinking again because I just watched a guy go over the Falls on a jet ski."
Sadly Robert isn't the only person to have died going over Niagara Falls, but in a bid to deter people from performing stunts like his, Canadian and American authorities have long enforced hefty fines for going over the water's edge.
According to Niagara Action, you could be fined as much as $10,000 from the Canadian Government and up to $25,000 by the US Government.
Niamh Shackleton