On Nov. 17, I knocked on the door of an apartment on the 22nd floor of 200 Wellesley St. E.

The man who answered was polite, claimed to know nothing about what had occurred in the unit alongside — two deaths, two men tumbling off the balcony four months apart — and said he’d just hung up the phone after speaking to his next-door neighbour, who was staying elsewhere for a while.

Only two days before Christmas, someone from the apartment where the Star had gone seeking information, where that nice young fellow had opened his door to a stranger, fell from the balcony and was killed.

Initial media reports indicated the victim was probably a visitor rather than a resident. I don’t know if the dead man is the individual I’d spoken with five weeks earlier. No name was ever released by police. The incident was not treated as a suspicious death. Together, that dearth of information suggested suicide. Cops don’t identify people who take their own lives — unless maybe you happen to have been married to Ontario’s former health minister and were twice the subject of a public search after disappearing.

Perhaps it’s a kindness, to provide anonymity for those who kill themselves and withhold details from the public. Suicide is still considered deeply shameful, a profound failure to cope, though it shouldn’t be characterized that way. Suicide prevention experts typically fear publicizing such incidents, convinced that knowledge might influence others in similar pain and hopelessness to jump or open a vein or swallow a fistful of pills. This strikes me as ridiculous, because the deeply distraught are so consumed with self they’re barely aware of that’s going on outside their heads. The rest of the world doesn’t register. But such speak-no-suicide conventions drive mental health issues and the despair that arises further into the closet.

In Toronto, addressing the consequences rather than the cause became a survivor-guilt impetus for the Bloor Street viaduct to be sheathed in a suicide-proof “luminous veil” barrier, at a wasteful cost of $6 million. And, it’s true, no jumper ever leapt from the notorious bridge again. But suicide rates across the city didn’t go down. The suicidal simply found other bridges for their purpose or pursued different means. All it takes is a chair and a length of rope, or a knife slicing lengthwise — never across — along the wrist, or a stroll into the river with rocks in your pocket.

If we’re going to pinpoint particularly alarming locations, however, then maybe a suicide shroud should be pulled over 200 Wellesley St. E. Or the entire building — the largest public-housing highrise in Toronto, with 700 units — should be condemned, shuttered and torn down.

It’s unlikely some psychology doctorate out there is doing a dissertation on it, but 200 Wellesley is a freakishly menacing and macabre address, worthy of a Stephen King novel. Those who live there, of course, don’t have much choice. Some have been waiting more than a decade for transfer to another Toronto Community Housing residence.

The Star was on the 22nd floor last month, in the company of an anxious and longtime building resident, because a second individual had either jumped or fallen to his death off the balcony of a specific north-facing apartment.

The first victim flew off the balcony in early June, landing face-up, his nearly naked body sprawled half-on and half-off a concrete pad nearby the security office. Police did not consider that death suspicious, which implied the man did not fall out accidentally.

In October, another man dropped from the very same balcony and, while also not a designated a suspicious death, that individual must have taken significant steps before stepping out into space: By that point, the balcony was entirely enclosed, partly by a plastic tarp and partly by what look like — from below — wooden shutters. A seam on the tarp was slit open to squeeze through. Someone was dead-set on exiting that way.

The second jumper/faller was not believed to live in the unit; was either visiting or staying there off-lease. That’s not uncommon for the building, as many tenants have complained, with TCH officials paying little attention, occupants claim, to who’s squatting, who’s crashing. Further, with upwards of 1,200 people officially living at 200 Wellesley, security guards can hardly be expected to recognize faces that come and go.

But why have three — at least — gone out and over, in side-by-side apartments?

Can you imagine if there were three suicides — let’s even say fatal accidents — at a particular Toronto school over a mere six months? The therapists and reconstruction experts would be rushing in. Yet three no-name deaths, dropping 22 floors, apparently signify nothing more than happenstance, unconnected, a stand-alone (plunge-alone) “bad coincidence” as one senior police officer put it in November.

Some residents resent the lousy reputation that clings to 200 Wellesley. Most, however, are unhappy with the circumstances in which they are forced to live, with syringes on the pavement, suspected drug-dealing in units, and junk routinely tossed from overhead.

This, of course, is the building where a cigarette butt tossed over a patio railing ignited a heap of combustible materials on the patio below, triggering a six-alarm fire that drove 1,200 residents into the street three years ago. The 24th-floor unit was home to a known hoarder about whom other residents had repeatedly complained. An Ontario Fire Marshal report into the blaze blasted management for failing to remedy the hoarder issue. In October, five TCHC staffers were fired after a forensic accounting investigation found “evidence of wrongdoing by several employees.”

Last June, 600 tenants — including 130 children — who’d launched a class-action lawsuit against TCHC over the fire were awarded $4.85 million in compensation for lost properties and injuries suffered. That sounds a lot more generous than it was — the majority of recipients received less than $20,000 each.

Just this past Friday, a 2-year-old girl died in another unit. She apparently had been in the care of a teenager. An autopsy is scheduled for Monday.

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Too much dying, there.

But few seem unduly alarmed by the ghastly pattern that has developed of individuals either taking their own lives or slipping accidentally off side-by-side balconies. Either those units possess some kind of bizarre attraction for people seeking to do themselves fatal harm or the activities that take place therein are suspicious and dangerous. Something is tragically amiss. It’s too much of a coincidence.

Either this mystery is solved or 200 Wellesley Street E. needs an exorcism.