"A distraught woman jumped 60 feet to her death at the crowded Queens Center Mall Wednesday, landing on a teenager relaxing in a massage chair.
Mary Lovelace, 55, of Jamaica, Queens, took off her shoes and put her purse on a bench before climbing over a waist-high barrier at around 3 p.m. and plunging to the ground as scores of stunned shoppers watched.
"We heard people say, 'Don't jump! Don't jump!'" said Kathy Molkandow, 19, of Queens, who works in a clothing store.
Lovelace fell onto 17-year-old Derrik Munoz, who was chatting with his girlfriend on a reclining, dollar bill-operated massage chair on the ground floor.
"We were talking and all of a sudden I feel something heavy on me," said Daniela Giraldo, 18, of Queens, Derrik's girlfriend. "I get up and I see a lady on the floor."
A younger man who was walking with Lovelace raced in agony to her side, but it was too late to help.
"He screamed, 'No!'" said Jonathan Arrunategui, 16, of Queens, a shopper. "He ran straight [down] the escalators."
At first, Derrik, a 10th-grader from Amityville, L.I., seemed fine.
Then Giraldo noticed blood all over him and a gash in the back of his head: "I panicked, I started to cry," Giraldo said. "I didn't know what to do."
Paramedics took Derrik to Elmhurst Hospital Center, where doctors put a brace on his neck. He was in stable condition Wednesday, Giraldo and his parents by his side.
Scores of shoppers watched in horror as Lovelace's body lay still on the floor. The ground level was crowded with high-school students enjoying the start of city schools' spring vacation.
The body lay there until rescuers covered her with a sheet. Emergency service workers cordoned off the lower two levels of the mall after the apparent suicide and shut down escalators leading to the lower level."
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Jul 2nd, 2009 04:48 PM
