Frankie "Of Unsound Mind" Tanner, a professional daredevil who performed in Gnu and the surrounding districts for more than four decades, died on Sunday after jumping a motorcycle into an active trash compactor at the Eastside Municipal Waste Transfer Station. He was 62. Mr. Tanner launched from a plywood ramp at approximately 3:40 p.m. before an audience of roughly sixty people, cleared a row of eleven parked sanitation trucks, and entered the compactor's loading hopper while its hydraulic ram was in operation. He had not specified, in promotional materials or in conversation with station staff, what a successful completion of the stunt would have entailed, and no landing area had been designated. He was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics, who listed the cause of death as "compaction, voluntary."

Born in Gnu in 1963, Mr. Tanner began performing at age sixteen, when he rode a lawn tractor off the roof of the Harbor Road Kmart. His stage name was taken from the wording of a 1981 commonwealth court ruling, which he had framed and hung in his garage. His better-known stunts included a jump over the Gnu Harbor drawbridge while it was fully raised, a motorcycle ride through the lobby of the Commonwealth Mutual building during business hours, and an attempt to outrun a controlled demolition from the inside — each of which, as The News reported at the time, ended in Mr. Tanner's death. He died during each of these, and during all of his other stunts, of which the family has counted 214. He maintained his black leather jacket, which he had owned since 1984, with a boot polish he mixed himself, and he refused to wear a helmet on the grounds that it would "flatten the hair." He is survived by his brother, Ray; his former wife, Donna, who remarried in 2006 and describes the arrangement as final; and a 1968 Triumph Bonneville, which was recovered from the compactor largely intact.

A memorial service will be held Thursday at 11 a.m. at the Eastside Municipal Waste Transfer Station, which will remain open to regular commercial dumping for the duration. Attendees are asked to park beyond the ramp, which has not yet been dismantled. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations of plywood. Mr. Tanner's next scheduled appearance, a jump across the mouth of Gnu Harbor on Saturday, has not been canceled.