Roman Belyakov, a 51-year-old Russian man, was walking through Lyalin Lane, right in central Moscow, when the sky literally fell on him.
An icicle, a long, pointed piece of hanging ice, broke loose from the roof of a residential building and struck him directly on the head.
But what surprised everyone, besides how strange the incident was, is that the man managed to survive. He was immediately taken to the emergency room at the Sklifosovsky Institute, where he underwent surgery for a traumatic brain injury.
Belyakov held on for three days, but eventually died on Friday, January 18, 2019, at 9:30 in the morning.
The most unsettling thing is not the accident itself, but how avoidable it was: the company managing the building, Dom-Master, had already received warnings to clean the roof. The company claimed it had removed the snow the previous day, but had been unable to remove the ice from the underside and was waiting for specialized machinery. In addition, according to them, the area considered dangerous had been cordoned off.
A death that is hard to believe and makes us reflect on how fleeting life is; you never know when your time may come.