This is the moment just before a 4-year-old girl who was left home alone took a tumble off a Queens fire escape Sunday and smacked into the concrete about 10 feet below.
The child was playing on the fire escape after her mother apparently left the girl alone at their 191st Street apartment in Hollis while running to a nearby store to grab milk, witnesses and neighbors said.
A neighbor snapped some photos of the girl, dressed in only a white shirt and underwear, just seconds before she began climbing down the ladder trying to get to the street below and fell. The girl was rushed to Woodhull hospital and miraculously sustained only minor injuries.
“She climbed down the last rung of the ladder, and then she was dangling,” a horrified neighbor said. “Then she fell down, and her chin was all bloody.
Jason Knight, 51 was walking across the street when he saw little girl standing with a bloodied face.
“I ran over, and the girl was crying, and she was in her underwear,” he said. “She had a bloody lip. I thought somebody had abandoned her. I called the cops, and they came right away.”
“She said she wanted her mommy. She could barely speak,” he added. “I thought the cops would arrest the mom, because she left her alone. You can’t leave a 4-year-old alone. Everybody knows that.”
Latoya Smith, 21, lives in the building next door, said that when the child’s mom arrived, she was upset that the police had been called.
“Why did you call the cops?” she heard the mom saying.
She said the mom first “told cops she’d left her daughter to watch TV while she went to get milk, but then she changed her story to leaving her daughter with a friend who later left the building.”