He shook the machine
for a free Coke.
It fell on him.
In the early hours of December 13, 1998, Kevin Mackle, 19, a student at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec, rocked a roughly 1,000-pound Coca-Cola vending machine, apparently trying to free a stuck drink or get his money back. The machine tipped forward and pinned him. He suffocated. He was found the next day — the day he was scheduled to take the train home to Ontario for Christmas.
A Quebec coroner issued his report nearly a year later. The Mackle family publicly disputed it, then sued Coca-Cola, the machine’s manufacturer, the campus food-service operator, and the university itself.
A Vendo machine. Already a known problem.
The machine in Kevin Mackle’s residence hall was a Coca-Cola-branded soft drink vending machine, manufactured by the Vendo Company of Fresno, California, and operated on campus by Beaver Foods, Bishop’s food-service contractor. It weighed approximately 420 kilograms — roughly 1,000 pounds — reported consistently by Times Higher Education and the trade publication Just Drinks.
Vendo’s machines were not a new safety concern in 1998. Nearly a decade earlier, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission had already required Vendo to retrofit its soft drink vending machines because of a tip-over hazard — a formal federal recall action, not a rumor. In 1996, the CPSC and seven vending machine manufacturers, Vendo among them, jointly launched an industry-wide warning-label campaign after documenting at least 37 deaths and 113 injuries in the United States since 1978, all caused by consumers rocking or tilting soda machines to free a stuck can or a refund.
Times Higher Education additionally reported at least three further deaths in Canada from the same cause. Mackle’s death was not an isolated, unforeseeable freak accident in the abstract — it was a specific instance of a hazard the machine’s own manufacturer had already been forced to address by federal regulators.
Twenty degrees. That’s the tipping point.
A soda vending machine of this era carries most of its weight high off the ground — the compressor, cooling unit, and stacked rows of full cans sit well above a narrow base designed to fit against a wall, not to resist being rocked. Reporting on the case put the tipping angle at roughly 20 degrees: rock the machine past that point, and gravity finishes the job. Once it passes its balance point, a machine this heavy cannot be stopped by a person standing in front of it — it can only fall on them.
The behavior that killed Mackle — shaking a machine to dislodge a stuck can or force a refund — was, according to the family’s later lawsuit, common practice at Bishop’s University, and a university employee had reportedly observed students doing it. This matches the pattern the CPSC had already documented nationally: the overwhelming majority of tip-over deaths and injuries follow the same sequence — a patron rocks the machine, it passes its tipping point, and the patron is pinned or crushed underneath it, most often male, most often young.
Vending machines of this weight and design are not fragile — the danger runs the other way. Their mass and high center of gravity are exactly what make them lethal once tipped past that threshold, and exactly why manufacturers were eventually required to warn users and retrofit older units.
One report. Two accounts of what it means.
Quebec coroner Dr. René Maurice Bélanger issued his official report on October 19, 1999 — nearly a year after Mackle’s death. The report found, among other things, that even as the machine fell, it did not dispense a single can, and it calculated the odds of Mackle shaking the machine at a moment it would never have yielded one at 128 to 1.
“Even as it fell over, the vending machine did not let out a single can.”
Quebec Coroner’s Report, Dr. René Maurice Bélanger — October 19, 1999
The Mackle family publicly rejected that account. Their central objection, as reported in coverage of the family’s subsequent lawsuit, was that the coroner’s report leaned heavily on explanations supplied by Coca-Cola, the Vendo Company, Beaver Foods, and Bishop’s University itself — and presented those parties’ own accounts as established fact rather than testing them independently. The family built a website, cokemachineaccidents.com, to lay out their case and argued that rocking the machine to free a stuck can was routine, visible behavior on campus that the university had the opportunity to notice and stop.
This account is disputed, and this page does not resolve it. What is documented on the record from both sides: the coroner issued a formal report naming specific findings; the family, separately and publicly, said that report relied too heavily on the defendants’ own version of events. Both positions are described here as reported — not adjudicated by this page.
In 2001, the family filed a civil suit in Quebec court against Coca-Cola, the Vendo Company, Beaver Foods, and Bishop’s University, seeking roughly C$1 million (about US$657,500 at the time) for “moral harm and material loss,” including funeral costs, and alleging “gross carelessness.” The suit alleged the defendants knew the vending machine model had a documented history of tipping over when shaken and did nothing to warn users or prevent it. A Coca-Cola spokesperson, Shannon Denny, said the company had since placed warning labels on its machines reading “tipping or rocking may cause injury or death.” University spokesman Bruce Stevenson called the death “a tragic accident that was difficult to foresee.”