Seconds from catastrophe: Shocking occasions to non-public tragedies… and a take a look at tales behind haunting images that captured the ultimate moments earlier than disaster

Final moments carry great weight, often representing the culmination of a person’s life on earth. 

Most of us want our last few minutes to be filled with peace and love, perhaps surrounded by the ones we treasure the most. 

But few will ever get to choose what out final moments look like, and often they are mere fantasies that provide some small comfort. 

Whether it is failure in the pursuit of goals, mistakes made in years prior that come back to haunt us, or just plain old bad luck, there are countless things that can derail this. 

And for an unlucky few, their last moments may be filled with terror and pain. 

With the mass adoption of recording equipment over the last century, more and more painful final moments have been captured than ever before. 

Here, MailOnline looks at some of the most infamous final moments before disaster ever to be recorded.  

Niagara Falls jet-ski parachute stunt

Thrillseeker Robert Overacker had been planning the terrifying stunt for the better part of a decade. 

The 39-year-old’s plan was to throw himself off a jet ski as it careened off the world-famous waterfall, before opening a parachute and sailing down safely.  

Though he claimed to have been raising awareness for the homeless, the effort he put into the small sign on his jet ski, which read ‘save the homeless’, compared to the logistical planning put into the stunt itself led many to believe he was throwing himself over Niagara Falls for its own sake. 

With little more than the jetski, a parachute and a lifejacket, he slid into the water and began driving his way up to the edge of the cascading water. 

In front of an estimated 3,000 tourists, he flung himself off the waterfall and plummeted below. 

In a better world, the ‘rocket-propelled’ mechanism on his parachute, designed to lift him clear of his jet ski to allow him time to open it, would’ve worked. 

But cops investigating his tragic couldn’t figure out how it could ever have worked. 

So instead, his last moment alive was captured on camera. 

Overacker was seen plummeting downward, with the jetski underneath him. 

The photo was taken minutes before his lifeless body was dragged into the Maid of the Mist, a tour boat packed with onlookers, where medical staff desperately tried to resucitate him on as they took him to hospital, where he later died. 

Tom Detenbeck, a parks police dispatcher, said at the time: ‘When you’re hitting water, it’s like hitting cement at that height.’

He said Overacker’s story should be a stark lesson to any would-be daredevils who wanted to recreate the stunt. 

‘You’re talking a million gallons of water going over the falls in a second. That’s a lot of force, a lot of power.’

Floating away while holding 600 balloons

The priest’s lower half was found floating in the waters around 60 miles off the coast of Brazil on a July afternoon in 2008.  

As a man of the cloth, Adelir Antônio de Carli wanted to live his life in accordance with principles set out in the Bible, even at the risk of his own life and safety. 

Though his work as the head of a parish in the Brazilian city of Paranaguá, in the country’s south, he was became known as a ‘troublemaker’ for his staunch fight in the name of human rights. 

According to the Tribuna do Interior, he spoke out in 2006 about the treatment of homeless people in the city. 

Cops had a policy at the time of arresting homeless people and dumping them in neighbouring towns. 

As a result of speaking out, a formal investigation was launched, leading to the arrest of seven police officers and one city officials. 

Basking in the glory of being a defender of the week, Carli knew he could, and wanted to, do more. 

He boldly decided he would beat the world record for the longest cluster balloon flight, which at the time sat at 19 hours, to raise awareness and money for a charity he had set up. 

Already a daring feat, Carli decided to give himself just six months to train and prepare. 

But his boundless enthusiasm for his task may have been his downfall. 

Reports after his tragic death revealed that while he had enrolled in a paragliding course, he refused to attend theory lessons and was eventually kicked out after he twice disobeyed his instructor.

But these setbacks did not stop him. 

Determined to carry out the terrifying stunt, he tested his nerve by successfully conducting a four-hour flight with 600 helium-filled balloons, reaching a dizzying height of 5,300 metres (17,400 ft) and travelling 16 miles from Ampére, Paraná, Brazil, to San Antonio, Misiones, Argentina. 

Emboldened by his success, he celebrated mass with some of his parish and took off from his city despite rain on April 20 2008. 

This time, he was far more prepared for his flight, carrying five days worth of rations, a thermal heat suit and waterproof overalls, as well as communication devices and a GPS signal. 

The last known photograph of him showed him beneath a tower of helium-filled balloons that gracefully lifted him into the air.  

But his refusal to train properly came back to bite him. 

He was heard saying via satellite phone roughly 20 minutes after taking off: ‘I need to get in touch with the staff so they can teach me how to operate this GPS here to give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way anyone on the ground can know where I am. 

‘The satellite cell phone keeps going out of range and furthermore the battery is getting low.’

His plant to land in Dourados in Mato Grosso do Sul, where his brother Marcos lived, 20 hours after he took off quickly went awry. 

His last contact with the ground team was made as he was around 30 miles off the coast of Brazil, forcing the Brazilian navy and air force to conduct an urgent search. 

But as they widened and widened their search, they were eventually forced to call off their hunt after pieces of balloon were seen floating in the sea around the area he was last heard from. 

For months, there was no sign of him. 

Then, in July of that year, the lower half of a human body was found floating in the ocean by an offshore oil rig support vessel about 62 miles from Macaé. 

After it was hauled up, it was positively identified as the unfortunate priest, first by the clothes he wore and then with DNA taken from his brother. 

The high price he paid for his causes was honoured and celebrated by his parish, who held a mass for him and buried him in a special chapel shortly after.  

Final look out the window before plane crash

Almost all of the 524 passengers and crew of the doomed Japan Airlines Flight 123 died as the plane crashed on the side of a remote mountain less than an hour after it took off. 

Just four women survived – Yumi Ochiai, an off-duty flight attendant, Hiroko and Mikiko Yoshizaki, a mother and her 8-year-old daughter, and Keiko Kawakami, a 12-year-old girl who lost her parents and sister in the crash. 

Worse was the litany of mistakes, both with the plane’s maintenance and the rescue operation, that catalysed the tragedy. 

Just 12 minutes after taking off from Haneda Airport in Tokyo on August 12 1985, the aircraft underwent rapid decompression that was so violent the ceiling of the rear toilets collapsed, and damaged the rear end of the plane. 

The pilot, Captain Masami Takahama, quickly realised the careening plane was virtually uncontrollable. 

The depressurisation had forced all the temperature-regulared air out of the plane, and let bitterly cold, and nearly unbreathable, air in. This had caused many on the plane to suffer from oxygen deprivation, slowing down the flight crew’s responses to the urgent requests for information from ground control.

The hypoxia the crew suffered was so bad that they didn’t think to put their oxygen masks on. 

For another 30 minutes, the plane plummeted uncontrollably before it crashed at a dizzying speed of 390mph into Mount Takamagahara so hard that nearby seismologists were able to record the exact moment of the final crash. 

But the crash didn’t kill everyone – the botched rescue did. 

While a nearby US Air Force unit was preparing a search-and-rescue operation, this was aborted by Japanese authorites. 

A nearby US chopper spotted the crash site, but was unable to land due to poor visibility and difficult terrain – they said there were no signs of survivors, and so rescue teams were sent out the next day. 

But an investigation revealed that injured passengers were found well beyond the crash site, suggesting that while they may have survived the initial crash they died from shock and hypothermia. 

Ochiai, the off-duty flight attendant who survived, said that she could still hear the screams and wails of fellow survivors that gradually died throughout the night. 

A deeper investigation into the crash revealed that the plane’s poor maintenance directly caused the crash. 

A tailstrike from seven years prior damaged the plane’s bulkhead. A subsequently botched repair reduced the bulkhead’s resistance to wear, making it far easier for it to break apart. 

The consequences of the crash were dire. 

Public confidence in Japanese planes plummeted, with passenger numbers dropping by a third in the immediate aftermath. 

Domestic air traffic dropped by a quarter in the months after the crash. 

There was also a more human cost to the flight. 

Two Japan airlines employees, who were in charge of inspecting and maintaining the plane, committed suicide in an attempt to atone for the tragedy. 

And Japan Airlines, Boeing and the Japanese government paid massive amounts of money to the victims’ families to make up for what happened. 

But nothing would ever bring back the 520 lives that were lost that day.  

Snowboarding down Everest

For most people, Mount Everest represents a near indomitable challenge that few are ever able to conquer. 

But for Marco Siffredi, his family’s mountain conquering pedigree should’ve set him up for success. 

The talented snowboarder had already climbed to the peak of the world’s tallest mountain in 2001, with the aim of riding all the way down. 

But his dream of descending the ‘Holy Grail’ of slopes was partially shattered due to poor snow conditions at the time. 

A year later, determined to be the first snowboarder to ride down Everest’s Hornbein Couloir, he made his way up from the Tibet base camp. 

But the sherpas who were with him said he showed little enthusiasm for the arduous task, reportedly telling them in a weary voice: ‘Tired, tired…too much climbing…’

Weather conditions worsened on the mountain, and the sherpas pleaded with him not to go up. 

But Siffredi, determined to climb higher and higher, ignored him. 

Desperate to make it to Hornbein Couloir, he marched faster than his assistants who periodically lost sight of him. 

They reported seeing the image of a man at Hornbein Couloir standing upright, before silently riding his board down the mountain. 

Determined to make sure he was safe, they trekked to where he was last spotted. 

But the hours of wind and snow that battered the mountain had covered his tracks up, making their investigation near impossible. 

Siffredi’s body was never found again.  

Ash cloud that killed photographer

The veteran of the Korean War had already spent a lifetime bearing witness to horrors that few could ever imagine. 

So after he left the US Navy, Robert Landsberg decided he needed to choose a career that was far more relaxed. 

Ending up as an award-winning commercial photographer, he travelled the world taking images to sell to magazines. 

In the leadup to the world-changing eruption of Mount St. Helens, in Washington state, in 1980 he knew that something big was coming. 

In the weeks leading up to devastating eruption, he began documenting the changes to the volcano. 

On the morning of May 18 that year, he drove to a point several miles away from the volcano, which at that point had been bulging to the point of bursting as more and more magma built up below the surface. 

Thinking he was far enough away from the volcano that he was safe from any eruption, he began snapping it. 

But he was wrong. 

As fire and brimstone filled the sky above him, blocking the sun out, a massive cloud of hot ash and lava began flowing directly towards him, which he captured on film. 

Understanding that he would soon perish, and the importance of the photos he was taking, he rewound the film in his camera, placed it in his backpack and lay on top of it to protect it as best he could before he was consumed by the pyroclastic flow. 

17 days after the eruption, his body was found buried deep beneath the ash. 

But the film was safe and with it, the photos he took documenting how the eruption took place. 

Geologists were provided with deeply necessary documentary evidence of how the volcano erupted. 

All it cost them was Robert’s life.  

Gorilla’s fatal curiosity

Talk to anyone born after the year 2000, and they’ll instantly know the name Harambe. 

The Western Lowland gorilla called Ohio’s Cincinatti Zoo his home for just a few years of his life before he was shot and killed following a tragic set of circumstances. 

On May 28 2016, a three-year-old boy somehow managed to climb a three-foot fence and crawl through four feet of bushes before falling into the moat surrounding Harambe’s enclosure. 

While two of the gorillas in the enclosure went back inside a protected area after zookeepers signalled for them, Harambe’s curiosity got the better of him as the young boy, terrified for his life, screamed and splashed in the water. 

Getting more and more distressed by the screams of horrified onlookers, and the writhing child, he picked the boy up and aggressively began moving him about. 

An investigation by zookeepers after the incident revealed Harambe had been exhibiting ‘strutting’ behaviour, commonly associated with aggression. 

As Harambe carried the boy up a ladder to get him onto dry land, zoo officials were terrified that he would hurt the young boy and made the decision to kill Harambe. 

With a single shot from a rifle as the boy was between the gorilla’s legs, the 17-year-old gorilla perished in an instant, just one day after his birthday. 

Mis-judged parkour backflip

Captured in mid-air on a small, digital camera, Pavel Kashin’s face was gritted with determination. 

The Russian freerunner, considered at the time of his death to be among the best in the world, was seen in the middle of a backflip on the edge of a high-rise building in St. Petersburg. 

Despite his years of experience, the 20-year-old parkour expert misjudged the stunt and he plummeted off the side of the 16-storey building to his death. 

His friend captured his final moments alive, and his family released the photo in the hopes that it would deter other thrillseeking parkour enthusiasts from attempting anything similar. 

Politician photographs gunman assassin to shoot him 

Political killings are universally intriguing for many of us. Curiosity compels us to ask how killings take place, who carries them out and the circumstances that lead up to them. 

While killers, often professional assassins, are rarely caught, the New Year’s Day murder of Filipino councilman Reynaldo Dagsa stands out for one horrifying reason. 

As Dagsa celebrated the beginning of the new year with his family at their home in the city of Caloocan in 2011, taking photos to preserve what he had hoped would be long-lasting memories, he his life was cut short at the age of 35 by a gunman. 

But the assassin, a convicted robber out on parole, was captured mere seconds before he shot the politician. 

The haunting snap showed the killer pointing his .45 calibre pistol directly at Dagsa as he gets out of a silver car and stands next to the politician’s smiling family. 

Seconds later, the bullet passed through Dagsa’s brain and he was pronounced dead before he could be taken to a nearby hospital.

The photo was released publicly, splashing the front of Filipino newspapers, and was used by cops who arrested Arnel Buenaflor less than a week later, along with two other accomplices. 

Buenaflor claimed in court that he shot the politician in revenge for being shot in the head months prior by men connected with him, but cops said the shooting was related to Dagsa’s anti-corruption and peacekeeping work in the violence-ridden part of the nation.