A Manhattan animal rescue donor, the wife of a millionaire Wall Streeter, leaped to her death Thursday from the 14th-floor terrace of her luxury Upper East Side apartment, sources said.
Margaret Fagenson, 68 — who had been suffering from depression — pulled a small ladder from her closet and set it against the railing of her terrace just before 11 a.m. as a maid worked in another room, the sources said.
She climbed the ladder, lifted herself over the terrace railing and fell to a sidewalk alongside her building, the Henderson House apartments at East 86th Street near Carl Schurz Park.
Sources said Fagenson did not leave a note, and that an eyewitness who was too far away to help had witnessed the desperate woman’s leap.
“She is the last person who would do such a thing,” a shocked friend, who asked to remain anonymous, said as Fagenson’s body, covered in a sheet, was moved onto a gurney.
Fagenson’s husband, Robert, is chairman and CEO of Fagenson & Co., a boutique investment bank.
He appeared devastated as he stood by his wife’s body, holding the leashes to the couple’s two toy poodles, Smokey and Bandit.
The couple has for many years supported animal rescue groups, including the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Humane Society.
They donated generously to the North Shore Animal League America, in 2011 giving $75,000 to fund mobile adoption units for shelter groups across the country.
“I saw them yesterday,” one neighbor told The Post. “And they were so happy.”
Additional reporting by Daniel Prendergast and Laura Italiano