A 25-year-old man heroically saved a woman from a falling elevator in a Lower East Side building Thursday, telling her “Happy New Year” as he shoved her out of harm’s way — just before he was fatally crushed, witnesses and police said.
Stephen Hewett-Brown was trying to escape a stalled elevator in the apartment building on Broome St. near Pitt St. in Manhattan, police said.
He was trapped around 11:30 p.m. when the lift started moving.
“I tried to help the guy, but he was between the elevator and the building door,” said Manuel Coronado, 23, who was visiting his grandmother in the building. “He was saying ‘I can’t breathe.’ “I tried to pull him up, but he said ‘Leave me here, leave me here.'”
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Coronado said the doomed man pushed building resident Erude Sanchez, 43, out of the elevator before it fell down the shaft.
“She started going in, but the elevator started going down and he pushed her out,” Coronado said, translating for the Spanish-speaking woman. “He said ‘Happy New Year’ and pushed her out.”
It was sheer chance that the man was even in the elevator to aid Sanchez, Coronado said. He was told the hero didn’t live in the 26-story building but had come from the Bronx to attend a New Year’s Eve party.
Coronado said he and other residents desperately dialed 911, but help didn’t come for 20 to 30 minutes. The wait was agonizing.
“We called and they took a long time to come,” he said, despite the 7th Precinct stationhouse being nearby. “It’s a block away. I don’t know why they didn’t come to help.”
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The courageous victim was rushed to New York Hospital in “traumatic arrest” at 11:54 p.m, an FDNY spokesman said, but he could not be saved.
“I’m grieving my son,” Brown’s distraught mother told the Daily News Friday. “I’m grieving my son. We don’t want to say anything.”
The building has three active city Buildings Department violations, all for elevator defects and all dating to May 30, 2014.
A man who answered an emergency line for Wavecrest Management, which runs the building, said no one would be available to comment until after the holiday weekend.