Toronto police are asking the public to help identify a woman seen in an Instagram video throwing a chair off a highrise balcony toward the Gardiner Expressway below.

“I was outraged, just like everybody else who saw the video,” Toronto police spokesperson David Hopkinson said. “Anybody could’ve been walking underneath,” he said, adding if someone was hit, they could have suffered “catastrophic” injuries.

The video, which was widely shared online Sunday, shows an unidentified woman pick up a folding chair and toss it over the rail hundreds of feet in the air. The video follows the chair as it hurtles toward the busy expressway and ends just before it hits the ground.

The short video clip appears to have been filmed by a second person, who does not appear on screen.

If the woman is caught, charged and convicted, Hopkinson said her punishment could be “unbelievably serious,” if she was intending to strike someone below.

Even if it was a random act, the woman could still be charged with mischief endangering life, Hopkinson said.

A conviction for mischief causing “actual danger to life” could result in prison time, he said, noting the gravity of the penalty would depend on intent.

In a Monday news release, police said the video was filmed at 10 a.m. Saturday in the area of Harbour and York Sts., and that other items were thrown from the balcony as well. The items landed near the entrance to a condo building, police said.

The woman is described as in her 20s, five foot one or five foot two, 110 pounds, with a slim build and long blond hair. She was wearing a black leather jacket, black clothing and black high heels in the video.

Several people near Lake Shore Blvd. and York St. on Monday told the Star they were shocked by the video.

Ron Power said he saw a broken chair like the one in the video near a bike rack outside the south entrance to Maple Leaf Square Condos, where he lives, Sunday afternoon. He said he didn’t know it may have been thrown from the building until he saw the video online.

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“I think it’s pretty scary. It could kill people,” he said.

Farai Zvobgo, who has lived in the building since 2016, said the video incident was “disturbing.”

“If I have neighbours that are so reckless, it makes me concerned about my well-being,” she said. She didn’t recognize the woman in the video, but said she’s concerned about people putting their units up for Airbnb and renting them to strangers.

Zvobgo said there were posters around the building warning people against throwing stuff from their balconies, and the only things she’s ever seen thrown out are cigarette butts.

Pedro Furtado, who walks around the building every morning on his way to work at Scotiabank Arena, said he has seen beer bottles and cans thrown out the windows, but never anything as big as a chair.

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From now on, he says he’ll avoid walking on uncovered sidewalks around that building and others in the area. “I’m walking underneath. That’s my safety,” he said.

After watching the video, Debra Maciel who works in the Maple Leaf Square Condos building said she immediately recognized the building as being where the video was taken.

“I can’t believe she did that. What a dummy. She could have killed somebody,” she said outside the building Monday.

She said she was sitting outside the same building last summer when someone threw a can of Red Bull that nearly hit a person’s head.

Maciel said many units in the downtown buildings are listed on Airbnb, and she suspects it might be temporary occupants who randomly throw stuff out.

“I don’t think anyone that lived here would actually do something like that. I’d hope not,” she said.

Andrew Maclean, an IT consultant whose office is nearby, said the chair toss had the potential to cause “a huge accident and ruin someone’s life from this ridiculous stunt just to get attention, getting Instagram followers or whatever.”

“That person should be found,” he said. “Absolutely.”

People have always done daring and dangerous things for various reasons, but new technologies have made it seem more ubiquitous and instantaneous, said Philip Mai, the director of business and communication at Ryerson Social Media Lab.

“People trying to get attention is nothing new. It’s a part of human nature,” he said, noting no one knows yet why that woman threw the chair off the balcony.

He said the world is still trying to figure out the etiquette for what is acceptable behaviours in the social media era.

“It takes time for the laws and the norms to catch up,” he said, adding that more incidents of viral videos could soon lead to society enacting rules to regulate people’s behaviours in that regard.

The video sparked a viral thread when it was posted to Reddit late Sunday night.

A Reddit user posted a photo of two broken chairs on the ground in the area that appear to match the one from the video. The user told the Star they saw the chairs at the northeast corner of Lake Shore Blvd. and York St. just after 8:10 a.m. Monday.

With files from Claire Floody

Jack Hauen is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star’s radio room in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @jackhauen

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