High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The death of Philip Gale by suicide took place on Friday March 13, 1998. Gale fell to his death from a classroom window on the fifteenth floor of a building on the MIT campus. Before ending his life, Gale (a pioneering internet software developer, computer prodigy, and avid musician) had earned roughly a million dollars worth of stock options for his innovative internet service provider (ISP) programs at EarthLink.