According to the old joke, a man leaps from the top of the Empire State Building and lives to tell about it. He lives to tell the 102nd floor, the 101st floor….
Last week a man actually did jump from the observation deck on the 86th floor of the 1,250-foot-high skyscraper and survived, but that’s because a catwalk one floor below the deck broke his fall.
LU’s partner Newsmax reports:
Nathaniel Simone (also reported as Nathaniel Fimone), 33, of Hamilton, Mass., reportedly climbed a security gate around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday before falling off the edge of the observation deck… As tourists watched in horror, Simone landed one floor below.
‘He jumped from the 86th floor and landed on a catwalk just below it, between the 86th and 85th floors,’ New York Police Department Detective Mark Nell told ABCNews.com.
Simone suffered a broken ankle for his trouble and was taken to New York’s Bellevue Hospital in police custody. Authorities say that it’s not yet clear whether the man’s fall was intentional, though witnesses maintain that he appeared to then straddle the edge of the catwalk, as if preparing to jump from it, and that security guards quickly restrained him.
“He was in his own world, like he was lost,” one witness told the New York Daily News. “He was calm, looking down, like it was nothing, but it was 80 stories high.”
Simone is now facing charges of reckless endangerment, criminal trespass, and disorderly conduct.
In the years since the building’s completion in 1931, more than 30 people have committed suicide by leaping from the observation deck, which is as high up on the structure as non-authorized personnel are able to reach. In 1947, a security fence was erected around the observatory terrace.
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