Barista falls to death from fire escape after drinking
A Wisconsin transplant who regularly drinks on her Manhattan rooftop with pals drunkenly slipped off the fire escape as she climbed back to her apartment and fell to her death early Tuesday morning, authorities said.
The woman, identified by sources as Kasey Jones, 26, was intoxicated when she lost her footing and fell five floors before slamming into a concrete passageway on the side of her Vermilyea Avenue building around 2:20 a.m., cops said.
The impact of her body hitting the pavement woke several of her sleeping neighbors.
“I heard people running on top of the roof,” said Jones’ next door neighbor, Sangelys Perez, 15.
Moments later, her horrified roommate frantically opened the boy’s window and screamed for help.
“Her roommate opened my window,” the boy said. “She was crying. She said I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“I asked her ‘are you OK?’” Perez recalled. “She looked down and said ‘she fell she fell.’ I was scared I didn’t know what to do or say.”
The boy’s father Julio Acosta, 57, said he “heard a big boom,” when her body smacked the pavement, and went to check on his son.
“I feel sad. She was so young,” Acosta said, adding that Jones was an avid cyclist who worked as a barista at Plowshare Coffee Roasters on West 105th Street.
“Yesterday I saw her going out with the bike,” he said. “She said hi to me. It pains my heart.”
A family friend who knew Jones said the woman attended the University of Wisconsin, and recently moved to New York within the last year.
Several of Jones’s social media accounts show her drinking on the roof on different occasions, including some showing her sitting and standing dangerously close to the edge.
Last week Jones posted a photo of herself dangling her feet over the fire escape where she would later fall to her death.
“It scares the bejesus outta me whenever you post these ‘casually leaning over the edge’ pics,” a friend wrote on her Instagram page.
Jose replied by saying, “well I have a lot of whiskey to help me out.”
Another recent photo shows a bottle of beer brewed in her home state resting on the ledge of the rooftop.
Hours after the tragic fall, several liquor bottles could still be seen on the rooftop near the fire escape ladder, including a bottle of Tullamore D.E.W. Irish Whiskey and a bottle of Tanqueray London Dry Gin.
“They drink up there, that’s what they do,” said Frances Guerrero, 34, who said the girls access the roof by using the fire escape to not trip the fire alarm linked to the door in the stairwell.
“I used to climb the fire escape too, It’s very slippery when wet, and it was raining last night” she said. “When you are inebriated you don’t use your head.”
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