Officials: Man Crushed to Death by Elevator in New York

Stock image of an elevator. (3282700/Pixabay)

A man in New York City was crushed to death when an elevator in a building suddenly dropped onto him.

The incident took place on Aug. 22 at 8:30 a.m. at the 23-story building known as the “Manhattan Promenade” near 3rd Ave. and East 26th Street, the New York Post reported.

The victim was exiting the elevator when the elevator dropped and caused the man to become stuck between the elevator and the shaft wall near the first floor, FDNY Deputy Chief Anthony Arpaia told the paper.

There were six other people on the elevator, and one person had exited the elevator before the man, whose name has not been released, became trapped, the report noted.

The victim “was sort of stuck between the first floor and basement,” he said and added that “some people were still left down in the car after it moved down in the basement.”

Sources told the Post that the victim was believed to be a 30-year-old man who lived in the building.

The elevator’s other five passengers were rescued and taken out, officials said.

“The FDNY had to work really hard to get the car moved,” Arpaia confirmed.

A building employee said that security footage captured the fatal incident. As the elevator door began to close, the victim placed his hand out to try to stop it from closing, the New York Times reported.

However, the lift kept going down and he attempted to rush through the door before he was caught. “Like jumping out of a car if it’s still moving,” the person said.

The Times also reported that the 23-story apartment building was recently fined $1,300 after inspectors “found that a safety feature on one of the elevators had been disabled or tampered with.”

One building resident, Alex, 25, said that the elevators typically had problems, adding that one of the elevators was not working on the same day of the accident.

“We saw the warning signs,” Alex told the news outlet. “The thing breaks all the time. It’s pretty bad.”

Alex added that one time, he had to pull the elevator’s sliding door shut to keep himself inside as “the door won’t close all the way.”

Another woman said riding the elevator was like being on an amusement park ride. “It’s out all the time. I’ve been stuck inside the elevator before,” the woman said. “It’s super scary, they always jump between floors.”

Dayna Sargen, a resident, said that “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel comfortable putting my kids in an elevator here again.”

She added: “The elevators are constantly breaking down, there are very, very frequent maintenance issues with the elevator.”

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)(pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.304229932