Authorities had discovered the body of a Caucasian male on the City-side slopes of the mountain on Sunday evening. They now strongly suspect the body to be that of Rob Taylor.

A recorded message on the property developer’s cellphone now tells callers that the number is no longer in use.

Officers identified him through a credit card found on his body.

The police’s Ezra October was quoted as saying that the death is being treated as a suicide for the moment.

“It is unclear why the man jumped. He jumped from right underneath the cable car area,” he said.

If the body is that of Rob Taylor, then the man’s death will have some small ring of poetry to it, having died on the same mountain that was the site of one of Cape Town’s greatest known acts of spontaneous charity almost exactly a year prior.

In January 2010, Taylor was moved by the plight of two car guards at the parking area of the Table Mountain Cable Way. He asked one of the car guards to hop into his R8, after which the men drove to a scooter dealership. Taylor then handed ownership papers over to the car guard, purchased a scooter for himself, and drove away, having donated the vehicle to the car guard and his colleagues – but not before giving him an additional R20 000 to go along with the car.

Taylor was also well-known for having previously offered his Lamborghini Diablo to the traffic officer who caught him travelling at 208kph in Camperdown, KwaZulu-Natal. Taylor’s explanation for the offer was that it would be a fitting means for him to “punish himself”.

If Taylor is the man who was pulled from the mountain, it would be a tragic end to a life that, from the outside, seemed to have been dogged by guilt in wealth, made lighter by sweeping acts of charity. That, or saint-like indifference for material wealth.

[Source : News24]

UPDATE: CLICK HERE to see how Rob Taylor planned the ‘Ultimate Jump’ for a year before it happened.