A 2-year-old girl hit by a falling brick while sitting with her grandmother at a senior citizens residence owned by a prominent New York Jewish family has died.
Above: Greta Greene and her mother Stacy
2-Year-Old Girl, Struck By Falling Brick From Dilapidated “Luxury” Senior Citizens Residence, Dies
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
A 2-year-old girl hit by a falling brick while sitting with her grandmother at a senior citizens residence owned by a prominent New York Jewish family has died, the New York Post reported.
Greta Greene was being held by her grandmother, 60-year-old Susan Frierson, outside the Esplanade on the Upper West Side of Manhattan just after 11:00 am Sunday when the brick fell 8 stories off a poorly maintained dilapidated window ledge and struck both Frierson and her granddaughter as they sat on bench. The baby was struck in the head; the grandmother on her legs.
“I saw the grandma stagger. She was holding the baby in her arms,” Nelson Amaya, the doorman of a nearby building, told the Post.
The baby was soon brain dead despite emergency surgery that removed a portion of her skull to allow her swelling brain room to expand. She was kept on life support at her family’s wishes until the donation of her organs could be arranged, law enforcement sources told the Post today.
The little girl’s parents were at her side as life support machinery was removed, those sources reportedly said.
Immediately after the brick fell, onlookers, a nurse from the Scharf’s senior center, rushed to help the grandmother and her granddaughter.
“I was walking down 76th when I heard the screams. The kid was gushing blood from her head,” Tsvi Kohl, who lives nearby, reportedly said. “Me and three other ladies tried to give [the child] CPR and see if she had a pulse and was breathing. She was breathing but barely…There was no movement, no function, no cry. Just a beautiful baby girl.”
The Scharf family’s Esplanade senior residence, which has promoted itself as “a luxury senior residence” since it opened just over two decades ago, was poorly maintained, inspectors from New York City’s Department of Buildings said after the accident. Their report reportedly found that the Scharfs failed “to maintain the property in a safe and code-compliant manner.”
The Department of Buildings issued a violation, a department spokesperson reportedly said.
But in 2010-2011, the Scharfs paid the Department of Buildings $6,467 in fines after they were unable to show they had performed a facade inspection.
According to the Post, the disrepair at the the building was obvious from the street, and at least two other exterior windowsills were missing bricks when the Post checked this week.
The Esplanade’s website says the Scharf’s are trying to set “the highest standard in senior living in New York, NY. Their personal involvement and hands on approach imbue The Esplanade Manhattan with a warm and welcoming environment.”
A 1997 article in the New York Times about the Esplanade noted that "about 90 percent of the residents, whose ages range from 85 to 100, are Jewish" and "the food is kosher."