Jennifer Rosoff
(Brigitte Stelzer)
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)
A happy first date ended in horror early yesterday when a dilapidated railing collapsed — sending a woman plunging to her death from her 17th-story balcony in front of her horrified suitor.
Jennifer Rosoff, 35, went to dinner Wednesday evening with Stephen Close, 35, and then invited him back to her apartment at East 57th Street and First Avenue, where the two went onto the balcony for a smoke, law- enforcement sources said.
The beautiful account executive was sitting on the edge of the balcony at about 12:30 a.m. when Close heard two sharp pops and the railing buckled beneath Rosoff, sending her flying backward, sources said.
Rosoff plunged 15 stories and landed on scaffolding on the second floor, police said. She died instantly.
“My friend fell! She fell off the building!” witnesses heard Close scream.
Close, who works in real estate, according to a law-enforcement source, had tried to warn the woman to get down.
“He looked at the balcony, and he told her, ‘Look, this thing looks unstable. Hey, maybe you want to get down,’ ” the source said.
Rosoff brushed aside Close’s concerns, telling him, “I’ve done this before.”
Another witness said he heard the woman’s screams as she fell.
“It was around 12:30 a.m., and I heard what sounded like a woman howling in the sky,” said Dean Charny, 42, who was at street level.
“The boyfriend came running out of the building screaming, ‘Oh, my God, my friend fell! She fell!’ He was holding his face in his hands,” Charny said. “He looked miserable.”
Rosoff, who worked as an account executive for a Flatiron Web-advertising company called TripleLift, had lived in the building for about a year.
In February, the building’s management company, Stonehenge Management, signed off on its latest building facade-inspection report, required every five years by the city Department of Buildings, a DOB spokeswoman confirmed.
“This is a tragedy and our sincere condolences go out to the family and friends of Ms. Rosoff,” a spokeswoman for Stonehenge said in a prepared statement. “We are cooperating fully with the investigation into the cause of this terrible accident.”
Rosoff was the second of three sisters and was originally from Huntington, LI.
“She was a great person — smart, very successful at everything she did,” said her cousin, Brian Sacks, 30, as he stood outside the building yesterday afternoon.
“I’ve been up there with her in the past. I had reservations about that balcony,” he said.
“It seemed shaky. It didn’t seem solid. I didn’t like the idea of her hanging out up there,” the grieving cousin said.
“The railing looked like it was falling apart up there.”
Additional reporting by Antonio Antenucci and Lorena Mongelli