[THE BIG APPLE]

NY Times

Woman Fatally Crushed in Midtown Elevator Accident

Updated 5:01 p.m. | A 41-year-old advertising executive at Y&R was crushed to death Wednesday by an elevator at the company’s Madison Avenue headquarters when the door closed on her leg and the car shot up, pinning her between the floor of the elevator and the ceiling of the elevator entrance, the authorities said.


“She was stepping in and the elevator shot up,” a law enforcement official said. A man and a woman already in the elevator could only watch helplessly.

The woman, Suzanne Hart, a director of new business at Y&R, one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, which happened around 10 a.m. at 285 Madison Avenue, a 28-story building at the corner of 40th Street.

A Fire Department official described the accident as follows:
Her foot or her leg are heading into the elevator while the door is open. Her one foot is in the car; but then, the doors close on her leg and the elevator shoots upward. And she is just kind of yanked up with it. Then, the elevator car becomes pinned between the first and second floor. It seems like her body is what stops the elevator’s movement.

The official said that it took about an hour just to remove the two other passengers, who were not hurt but were taken to New York University Langone Medical Center. “I don’t think any physical injuries,” he said. “It is just what they saw, traumas.”


Meredith Hoffman
for The New York Times
285 Madison Avenue on Wednesday.Ms. Hart’s body remained jammed in the elevator for considerably longer, stuck in what is called the blind shaft between the first and second floors.

Her body was finally wheeled out of the building shortly before 7 p.m.

At Ms. Hart’s home, a townhouse on State Street in Brooklyn Heights, her boyfriend, Chris Dickson, spoke briefly from his stoop Wednesday evening.

“She’s a beautiful person and I don’t have words for this,” he said. “I loved her.”

Ms. Hart’s father, Alex Hart, who lives in Florida, was beside himself with grief. “She was the most marvelous daughter imaginable,” he said by phone, weeping as he spoke. “No father could have ever been more proud of her.”

Chad Kawalec, a former director of client services at Y&R and friend of Ms. Hart’s, described the elevators in the 85-year-old building as creaky and balky.

“They weren’t the kind of elevators that you stuck your hand in to catch the doors,” he said, “Because they wouldn’t stop.”

A spokesman for the Department of Buildings, Tony Sclafani, said that the elevator that killed Ms. Hart was last inspected in June and that “no safety issues were found at that time and no conditions were found that would be related to this accident.” There have been many violations issued against the building’s 13 elevators in recent years, but all were for administrative or non-hazardous conditions, Mr. Sclafani said.............