Image by Buda Mendes/Getty Images for Laureus / Futurism Developments
Nearly 13 years after skydiving from the edge of space, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner has died during a tragic accident.
As the New York Post reports, Baumgartner was 56 when he took on what became his last stunt: flying a motorized paraglider near the town of Porto Sant Elpidio, a beachside resort off Italy's Adriatic coast.
According to the NYP's translation of the Italian newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, the extreme athlete said he was feeling ill prior to his fatal accident. Though an air ambulance was called to the scene, its services were ultimately never used because Baumgartner's heart had stopped, the Bologna-based newspaper reported.
Investigators on the case suspect that the Austrian adrenaline junkie may have had a heart attack while he was in mid-air that rendered him unconscious, which could have caused the literal death spiral that witnesses observed prior to him tragically crashing down near a swimming pool full of children.
"Everything was normal, then it started to spin like a top," described Mirella Ivanov, a 30-year-old mother who saw Baumgartner's crash, told the Associated Press. "It went down and we heard a roar. In fact, I turned around because I thought it crashed on the rocks. Then I saw two lifeguards running, people who were running toward."
The crash the young mother heard was likely the sound of Baumgartner's body and paraglider hitting a wooden structure nearby, the NYP notes based on another translation from the Italian-language Repubblica newspaper.
Porto Sant Elpidio's mayor, Massimiliano Ciarpella, confirmed his death shortly thereafter. In an interview with the AP, he eulogized Baumgartner and referenced his many daring feats of bravery, including the 2012 skydive where he filmed himself jumping from a balloon-lifted capsule that had ascended to Earth's stratosphere, breaking the sound barrier and eight world records in the process.
"It is a destiny that is very hard to comprehend for a man who has broke all kinds of records," Ciarpella said of Baumgartner's death, "who has been an icon of flight, and who traveled through space."
A former Austrian military parachutist, Baumgartner had also, among many other stunts, thrown himself off Brazil's Christ the Redeemer statue in 1999 in a so-called Building, Antenna, Span, or Earth (BASE) jump with only a parachute to slow him. When he was training for his stratospheric leap over a decade later, the athlete referenced that record-breaking Brazilian blowout — and admitted to National Geographic that his need for speed might eventually kill him.
"I know that I can die undertaking the kinds of jumps that I do," Baumgartner told the magazine in 2010. "When I was ready to BASE jump from the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil, only 95 feet from the ground, it crossed my mind that in less than three seconds I could cease to exist."
"I don’t have a death wish," he concluded in that 15-year-old interview. "I’m a person who likes a challenge."
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