In early June, a young man flew off a balcony on the 22nd floor of 200 Wellesley.

Well, he didn’t fly, obviously. He fell straight down, landing face-up, nearly naked body sprawled half-on and half-off a concrete pad not far from the building’s security office.

Whether he was pushed, jumped or fell isn’t clear. All police had to say about it, when my colleague Joe Fiorito wrote about the incident, was that they did not consider the death to be suspicious. So not a homicide then; either an accident or a suicide.

On Oct. 28, about 9.30 a.m., another man dropped from the very same balcony.

“Neither one of ‘em left by the front door, that’s for sure,” says John Roche, who’s very concerned about the apartment unit involved, as are other residents of 200 Wellesley. Their pleas for information from building management have been ignored. They have a right to be told something.

Viewed from outside, that unit’s balcony is enclosed by shutters at either end and a heavy plastic tarp covering the gap in between, letting in not the slimmest shaft of daylight. Residents say it has always been thus sealed, in their memory.

The door to the apartment — no answer when a reporter knocked and knocked on Sunday — features, weirdly, three peepholes. The mail slot has been blocked from within. And there’s only a hole where the original lock used to be, though another lock has been added to the door handle.

“Perhaps it’s just someone who really values their privacy,” suggests 51 Division Staff Sgt. Korinne Bellon, “or is really paranoid. Or it’s a bad coincidence.”

She could not say whether last week’s occurrence is being investigated as a homicide or otherwise suspicious death. If the former, the case would fall to the central homicide squad and there was nobody available to speak with yesterday. The Star did reach building supervisor Maurice Noel, who said he did not have the authority to discuss the matter.

There are two individuals listed on the lease for that particular unit, neither of whom have been seen for weeks. The first fatality definitely did not live in that apartment.

One person falling off a balcony to his death is a tragedy; two people falling off the same balcony in less than five months is an alarming pattern.

“Something’s not right here,” complains Roche, 61, who has lived in the building since 2001. “Are police looking at the second guy as a murder? Does it have something to do with drugs? One person, okay, maybe he jumped or fell. But the second guy had to rip a hole in the tarp to get out that way. I’ve talked to numerous people who live here and they’re all horrified. But when we ask, all we’re told is: ‘We’re not at liberty to talk about it.’ Why not?”

That building is an address of considerable notoriety. When it’s not human beings hurtling off balconies, it’s a box of syringes, needles scattering on the pavement, and a wire rack that nearly fell on a kid’s head over the summer, or the 4.5 kilo plate from a barbell, or crockery or broken bottles or — most disastrously — a cigarette butt flicked from one 25th floor patio landing on the balcony directly below, igniting a heap of combustible materials, triggering the six-alarm massive fire that chased upwards of 1,200 residents from their apartments three years ago, many suffering physical and mental health ailments, displaced from their homes for months.

An Ontario Fire Marshal report into the blaze pinpointed the exact cause of the fire: that discarded cigarette, torching a unit occupied by a hoarder who’d previously filed a complaint about broken bottles and cigarette butts cascading on his balcony from the upstairs neighbor. The tenant of the unit where the fire began, Stephen Vassilev, no longer lives in the building. He was forced to move out. At the time, he’d crammed heaps of junk on his patio — newspaper bundles, an air conditioner unit, plastic bags and containers, shoes, cardboard, bikes — the detritus stack to a height 61 centimetres above the balcony railing.

The high rise public housing building of 700 units was then operated by Greenwin Property Management, for Toronto Community Housing Corp., and was blasted in the Fire Marshall report for failing to remedy the hoarding issue, which had been widely known. TCHC subsequently terminated the contract with Greenwin.

Last month, following a forensic accounting investigation into property insurance claims arising from the 2010 fire that “found evidence of wrongdoing by several employees”, five TCHC staffers were canned.

Just this past June, 600 tenants — including 130 children — who’d launched a class-action lawsuit against TCHC and Greenwin were awarded $4.85 million in compensation for lost properties and injuries suffered. The majority of recipients, 532, received less than $20,000 each.

Security around the building has been considerably heightened since the fire. Tenants had long complained that non-residents were constantly going in and out. They worried about drug-dealing on the premises and elderly tenants possibly being strong-armed by outsiders co-opting their units.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

While there have been violent episodes at that address in the past, bodies dropping from overhead — raining men — is startling even to residents long inured to bizarre happenings.

Begs Roche: “Somebody please just tell us what the heck is going on. We don’t even know if there’s been an arrest.”