Queens NY April 9 2009
nytimes.com
A woman leaped to her death from the third floor of the Queens Center Mall around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, landing on and injuring a high school student on the lower level of the shopping center in Elmhurst, four stories below. Shoppers screamed and ran. Police officers and the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, arrived to help calm the crowd.
Mr. Brown said the woman was in her early to mid-50s and in the company of two teenagers when she jumped. It appeared that she had leaped from near a T-Mobile cellphone kiosk in the center of the atrium, and landed near a Tax Solvers kiosk on the lower level, set up to deal with the busy tax season.
The glass barrier over which the woman jumped runs around the atrium on each level. The barrier is roughly waist-high and topped by a curved titanium banister. Police and emergency service workers cordoned off sections of the mall and shut down certain escalators leading to the lower level.
The lower level, where the woman landed, was packed with high school students, many of them milling about after school. The injured student was taken to Elmhurst Hospital. He was expected to survive.
The student was identified by family members as Derrik Munoz, 17, who attends Amityville High School.
His father, Ruben Munoz, got word of the injury and happened to be working in the area and rushed to the mall. “I got there at the mall just before they left to take Derrick to the hospital,” Mr. Munoz said in an interview. “We’re waiting to hear from them now, what his status is. They need to do tests on his head.”
The teenager was sitting in one of four leather massage chairs on the lower level of the mall when the woman fell onto him, striking his head, the father said. At the mall, custodians were seen wrapping the four chairs in black plastic to take them out.
A witness, Shanell Williams, 26, said she was serving customers at the NYS Collection, a sunglasses kiosk on the second floor, when she said she heard a loud thump. “First I thought it was a gunshot, and I said ‘I’m out of here,’” Ms. Williams said. “People started screaming. There was pandemonium and chaos. And I looked below to the lower level and people were screaming that someone had jumped from above.”
Ms. Williams said the death left her badly shaken. She said she just wanted to finish her shift and go home.
Geraldine Obregon, 20, a Starbucks employee and a LaGuardia Community College student, was working on the second floor of the mall when the woman jumped. Ms. Obregon said in an interview:
Everybody was running, so I went to the balcony to see what happened. The first thing I saw was the kid sitting on a chair on the lower level looking up with blood gushing from his head. He looked like he was dazed or something, he was just staring around, and there was a lot of blood pouring off of him. Then I saw the woman, she was face down, with her hands sort of by her side. It looked like her hair or a wig had fallen off her head. She didn’t have any shoes or socks on. She wasn’t moving. At first I thought it was some high school kids fooling around and that she had fallen to the basement, but then everybody said that she had jumped and that it was a grown woman. Every bannister in the mall was just covered with people staring at what happened. And then in about two minutes there was, like, a ton of Fire Department and police officers here.
As police officers patrolled the mall, a security guard on duty on the lower level told Time Warner customers: “Time Warner is closed. If you’ve got a bill due, don’t worry about it. They said they won’t cut off your service today.”
JOIN THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PRIVATE OFFICERS
www.privateofficer.com/
Get news alerts, officer down, weather emergency news in your mailbox! Sign up;adminassist@privateofficer.com
Join us at www.myspace.com/privateofficernews
Come be part of our social network! www.privateofficer.com
