He said he believed that Mr. Genest had gone out for a smoke on an emergency third-floor balcony that is normally locked and might have been sitting on its railing, which he said rose only to “below the hips,” when he lost his balance and fell backward.

“From what we know, he fell on his backside,” Mr. Leduc told People.

Mr. Genest, who was better known as Zombie Boy or Rico, was born on Aug. 7, 1985, in a small town in Quebec. He said he had grown up fascinated by freak shows and tattoos.

“Even from age five I used to spend any pennies I had on bubble gum that came with transfer tattoos and stick them up my arms,” he wrote in the newspaper The Irish Mirror in 2016. “I’ve always wanted to look different.”

In school, he said, students found themselves neatly fitting into categories.

“Are you a jock, a nerd, a prep, a rapper, a metalhead?” he said in 2016 at a TEDx talk in Austria.