Teen Recovering After Being Blindsided by Mall Jumper

After catching the fall of a woman who leaped to her death inside the Queens Center Mall, a teenager has been released from the hospital without any memory of yesterday's accident. Derrick Munoz, a sophomore at Amityville High School, was sitting in a massage chair with his girlfriend on the ground level of the mall when 55-year-old Mary Lovelace landed on him after jumping from the third-floor balcony. He had suffered some non-life-threatening head trauma; his girlfriend told the News, "We were talking and all of a sudden I feel something heavy on me. I get up and I see a lady on the floor." Newsday says that before the jump, Lovelace "appeared to argue with other people, believed to be her relatives, before taking off her shoes and jacket and dropping her purse. She then dangled from a balcony railing and let go." The DA's office says that her two children witnessed the incident.

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By Billy Parker in News on April 9, 2009 12:43 PM

Comments [rss]

rhonda718

Is is really "blindsided" when the person falls on TOP of you?

StinaLES

who the f wants to die in a MALL?

hotstepper

suicide is for chumps. drink yourself to death instead. it's much more fun and sometimes you make a friend.

commisioner gordon

she couldn't get into Bobst

mmlanglie

FTW!

Gwinny

well, it's hard... they really check IDs there.

schizofriendly

Sure is hard to kill yourself. And ugly. And painful. And shameful. Even if Nembutol were available in this country as readily as pepto-bismol (allowing the suicidal to simply fall asleep to death), you will always have the occasional thespian who wants to create a fuck-the-world spectacle.

marcyd

Obviously she was not thinking straight and possibly mentally deranged. It's surprising she died, if it was only 3 floors and somebody broke her fall.

PTG in nyc

This lady might as well have brought in a bunch of guns and started shooting before taking her own life like all the other assholes out there. I don't mean to take suicide lightly, but there should be a law that allows one to commit suicide only if they are not in a public setting and are not a danger to anyone else. Yes, it's hard to enforce a law on dead people and punishing their surviving relatives would be harsh, but for anyone who fails at suicide in public, they should be sent to maximum security prison with the other murderers, not Bellevue for psychiatric testing.

w0wzers

she seen there was empty massage chair, but someone else was going to take it so she tried to jump in it.

tangent

This is the best post I've ever seen on Gothamist. lol

tangent

This is the best post I've ever seen on Gothamist. lol

GOP

I don't know what's worse: being the victim or the two kids.

jchez

I think the two kids. They'll have to remember this all of their lives. I think the teenager will recover.

Like I said, suicide is, by definition, a selfish act. The guys who close one side of the GW bridge by threatening to jump are not really thinking how much they are screwing up everyone else's day. Certainly, this woman and the guy who jumped inside the Marriot and landed on the bar didn't really think who they could hurt or kill on the way down.

Actually, the Port Authority was asked to put a fence on the GWB's sidewalks to deter suicides (they get 1 a month, although unpublicized) and they said that they rather have suicides use the bridge (no one else gets hurt) than jump from a window or balcony and hurt someone else.

Callous but right.

citizenerased

What a self-indulgant way to go. Hope the teenager recovers fully.

robingee

Who jumps to their death INSIDE? Weird

NannyState

Similar and equally horrible stories like that on Shanghaiist. It's just so cruel to subject people at a mall to something like that but the jumper didn't care, she got her column inch of red ink.

Pharmer

More reasons not to shop at malls.

Jen S

In Syracuse there's a big mall called the Carousel Center. There are frequent suicides/attempts in the atrium, which is open up to 6 or 7 floors.