BY YANNIC RACK | A Bronx man was crushed to death by a faulty elevator in a building on the Lower East Side moments before the rest of the city joined to ring in the new year.
Stephen Hewett-Brown, 25, an aspiring rapper, was reportedly heading to a New Year’s Eve celebration in the building when he stepped into an elevator at 131 Broome St. shortly before midnight on Dec. 31.
When the elevator suddenly got stuck between floors, Hewett-Brown helped one of the tenants in the building, Erudi Sanchez, get out of it and into a hallway. But when he tried to follow her himself, the elevator suddenly dropped, pinning him between its ceiling and the floor.
“When I got into the elevator, I felt it dropping and I thought my feet would get caught in the gap but the man pushed me out and said, ‘Happy New Year,’” Sanchez told The New York Post.
“I saw he was trapped and the elevator was crushing him. It was awful,” she said.
Residents reportedly tried to rescue the 25-year-old in vain.
A spokesperson for the New York Police Department said officers from the Seventh Precinct responded to a 911 call shortly after midnight and found Hewett-Brown unconscious and unresponsive, still pinned by the elevator and severely injured.
He was brought to NewYork-Presbyterian/Lower Manhattan Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to police.
According to news reports, the party that Hewett-Brown had hoped to attend continued until the wee hours.
Residents at the building, which is part of the Grand Street Guild complex and whose apartments are for low-income tenants, have reportedly complained for years about faulty elevators. The building owners, Grand Street Guild East HDFC, were slapped with two Environmental Control Board violations last year, and Department of Buildings records currently list three open violations dating back to a 2012 inspection.
Jay Yablonsky, the director of property management at Wavecrest Management, which operates the property, said the company was working with D.O.B. and police to determine the cause of the fatal accident, but wouldn’t comment on the complaints or violations.
“The safety of our residents is our paramount concern,” he said in a statement. “The elevators underwent a complete modernization in 2011, and are regularly inspected and serviced by a licensed elevator maintenance and inspection agency.”
In the meantime, Hewett-Brown’s mother has set up a gofundme page that is trying to raise $15,000 for the young man’s funeral.
“I’m not surprised that he would commit this selfless act,” Miranda Brown wrote of her son in a post on the fundraising Web site. “He was a good person, he would help anyone [and] even give you the shirt off his back if he had to.”
As of press time, two days after it was created, the page had attracted around $7,500 in donations, with contributions steadily coming in.
Residents of 131 Broome St. are meeting at 7 p.m. on Thurs., Jan. 7, to discuss elevator safety at their building.
