Baby Dies After Five-Story Fall
A baby boy has died after falling several stories from an apartment window in Philadelphia’s Powelton section Tuesday afternoon.
Police were called around 12:45 p.m. to the Westpark Apartments, a Philadelphia Housing Authority property, on the 300 block of N Busti Street for the report of a child that fell out of a window.
Witnesses saw the bleeding child on the pavement below as his mother came running and screaming for help from the building.
The mother, Lonnia Robinson, 22, told police she was in another room of the apartment when her son fell out the window. She said no one else was in the apartment, police said.
PHA spokeswoman Nichole L. Tillman was unable to immediately explain what the authority requires for window screens or other window safety precautions.
Vincent Payne, the boyfriend of the child’s mother, told NBC10’s Nefertiti Jaquez that the mom recently bought an A/C unit and wanted to have it installed in the window but it didn’t fit the dimensions.
Payne claimed the mother filed a work order to have it installed but was told that it couldn’t be done. Payne, who wasn’t there when the child fell, says the last time he was at the apartment he saw a piece of cardboard placed in the window. The mother’s bed lies right underneath the window, according to Payne.
