PHOTO EXCLUSIVE: LIFESAVERS: EMTs treat Angelo Kapatos on West 45th Street before transporting him to Bellevue Hospital yesterday. (Joseph Kantor)
Undated photo of Vangelis “Angelo” Kapatos.
The snowstorm that mangled New York saved the life of one Manhattan man.
A troubled Hell’s Kitchen resident jumped from his ninth-floor apartment window yesterday — but survived because he landed atop a mountain of trash bags that had been piling up since the Dec. 26 blizzard, cops said.
“Maybe it was lucky we had this snow and they hadn’t cleared the garbage,” said Katharina Capatos, the aunt of the victim, Vangelis “Angelo” Kapatos.
It was about the only good news from a torturous postblizzard week marked by a lackluster response to the storm, which included a catastrophic breakdown of snow-plowing that kept ambulances from getting patients to hospitals.
WATER WAY TO GO! SI STORMBUSTER
Kapatos, 26, of 325 W. 45th St., jumped just after noon, landing on his back on garbage bags heaped high outside the 10-story building, authorities said.
He left no note and no one was home when he fell.
Kapatos was taken to Bellevue Hospital in critical condition, and was in surgery hours later.
His aunt, who spells her last name differently, said he’d been released from Bellevue’s psych ward last Wednesday after spending about a month there following a nervous breakdown.
“I think he’s lonely. I think he has manic depression,” Capatos said.
She also said a dispute with his landlord — who she said wants to evict him from the $572-a-month, rent-stabilized unit that technically belongs to his parents — had been weighing on her nephew.
His next eviction hearing in Housing Court had been set for tomorrow.
“I want to live, but what is going to happen to me?” Capatos, 64, recalled him asking her recently.
Kapatos’ lawyer, Charles Small, received a frantic voicemail and e-mail from him Friday asking him to “reassure me that everything will be well.”
“I told him that there’s nothing to worry about, that his landlord has no case,” Small said he responded by e-mail.
But “I have no idea” if he got the message, Small said.
Neighbors described Kapatos, who moved from Greece with his family when he was 3, as quiet and withdrawn.
“He kept to himself . . . always had his headphones on,” said one building resident who asked not to be identified.
Kapatos’ miraculous survival was the silver lining in a storm cloud of bad news stemming from the blizzard.
“This was the perfect storm — excessive amounts of garbage between the Christmas and New Year holidays and nearly 2½ feet of snow,” said Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-SI).
In other storm-related news, the city announced alternate-side parking rules are again suspended today but “limited” garbage collection is resuming as of this morning. Some 700 trucks will be put to work out of the usual 1,300 for trash pickup.
As of yesterday, the city’s 311 hot line had received 13,032 calls about missed collections since Christmas — compared with a typical week of about 1,000 complaints.
“People are fearful, particularly with the weather now turning warmer, [that] it’s going to attract vermin, rats, raccoons,” said Ignizio.
But the city said statistics from 311 calls don’t back up the fear.
In the week after Christmas, there were 56 rat complaints out of a total 435 for all of December.
Additional reporting by Sally Goldenberg, John Doyle, Rebecca Rosenberg, Frank Rosario and Tim Perone