A 9-year-old boy obsessed with wrestling donned a makeshift parachute and jumped from his Brooklyn rooftop — a fatal bid to copy the signature move of his wrestling hero, family friends said yesterday.
Little Domori Miles is thought to have been trying to perform the Swanton Bomb, a technique made famous by World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Jeff Hardy and featured in the boy’s favorite PlayStation2 video game, Smackdown vs. Raw.
Domori plummeted 13 stories from a building in the Albany Houses in Crown Heights at 7 p.m. Tuesday, cops said. He died less than an hour later.
“Jeff Hardy does a kind of swan dive,” said Sumore Murell, 29, the mother of Domori’s best friend, who said she was a “second mom” to the boy.
“Domori thought it was really cool. He thought he could fly.”
The youngster, who Murell said had a learning disability and was also taking medications for multiple sclerosis, sneaked out of his home on the 10th floor while his mom was out shopping, police said.
His older sister had no idea he was missing, said Murell.
Domori climbed to the roof, lifted a plastic bag with string tied to it above his head, and leapt.
“He wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t moving,” said Robert Molina, 25, who saw the boy seconds after the fall.
“He had a white plastic bag in his hands. He was holding it like he was trying to fly.”
“He tried to do a dive like Jeff Hardy,” said Murell’s son, Shakur, 10. “That was his favorite game. He played it all the time. That’s what he was trying to do.
“If I’d seen him up there, I would have told him not to do it.”
Minutes after the fall, Domori’s mom came home and found her son’s broken body.
“Give me my baby! Give me my baby!” she screamed as emergency workers performed CPR.
He died 45 minutes later at Interfaith Hospital, cops said.
Hardy’s move, which he has performed from heights of more than 30 feet, involves leaping at an opponent before a last-second flip ending in a roll. No parachute is involved in the stunt.
A WWE spokesman noted that in the video game, “none of the characters jump off buildings nor use parachutes.”
Neighbors in the Albany Houses said an alarm would usually sound every time the roof door was opened. They said it was not working on Tuesday.
“Are they crazy?” asked Chiquita Jones, 25. “That door should have been alarmed. It should have been locked. Domori didn’t have to die.”
Cops said they do not suspect foul play in the boy’s death.