Police investigating second fatal fall in a month at Chicago mall
Chicago IL Jan 17 2020
For the second time in two months, someone has died after plunging from the seventh floor of Water Tower Place, according to Chicago police.
The latest incident happened around 5 p.m. Wednesday when a 25-year-old man fell to his death at the mall in the 800 block of North Michigan Avenue, according to Officer Anthony Spicuzza, a police spokesman, citing preliminary information.
Paramedics took the man to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:42 p.m., according to information from Chicago police and the medical examiner’s office. He lived in West Rogers Park.
Deonta Shafford, 19, of Riverdale, said he was in the mall with a friend who wanted to purchase a hoodie. The two walked out of Forever 21 and heard a “thump,” and everybody started looking. A woman pointed to a man lying on the ground several floors below them. Shafford said he first thought it was a mannequin.
Security then started telling people to get back. First responders quickly got to the man and started to perform chest compressions.
“Oh, my God. Wow. Wow. That is sad,” Shafford said in an iPhone video he took, as he zoomed in to see what had happened.
“Everybody was in awe,” he later said. “Some people froze. Some people didn’t know what to do but tell other people to get back.”
Shafford said he and his friend realized they had seen the man pass by them in the mall about 20 minutes prior to the fall.
“I tried to blur it out,” he said. “(My friend) was like, ‘Let’s go.’ I just kept talking about it because I was in shock. We all have our different type of shock, and he was just quiet and froze.”
The mall remained open Wednesday, but the first floor was closed off. A security guard on the second floor would ask customers not to stand close to the railing overlooking the scene.
It was the second such death at the mall in recent months. A 65-year-old woman died Nov. 24 when she fell from the seventh floor of the mall. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, and her death was later ruled a suicide by the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
