A hole lot of hurting
A BRONX WOMAN says she got a painful surprise when she stepped out of a cab, crossed the street and slid into a gaping hole next to a storm drain near her home, the Daily News has learned.
Lakesha Broadhead, 39, left for a late-night snack at White Castle after playing cards with friends, arriving at her Sedgwick Ave. home around 5 a.m. Sunday. She got out of the cab in the predawn darkness and before she knew it, she was jammed into the 3-foot-deep hole up to about the middle of her chest.
“That’s death right there, if the wrong person comes in the middle of the night,” Broadhead told The News. “My heart was beating so fast. No one was around to hear my screams.”
She said she grabbed the curb and pulled herself out, cutting and badly bruising her legs and hurting her back. She went into her Morris Heights building and called 911.
“I laid right there on the sidewalk, I was so happy to be alive,” she said. “My adrenaline was pumping.”
Broadhead said one of the EMS workers who responded to the scene asked to see the hole.
“He said, ‘Oh, f---ing God,’” she recalled.
She said her injuries — aches and pains and swelling to her legs — have left her with a limp and temporarily unable to work at her job as a security guard in a Bronx homeless shelter. She’s not being paid while she is on leave.
“It should never have been left like that,” she said. “A kid would have definitely slipped all the way in.”
Building super Luis Ortiz said tenants called the city to complain about the hole at least four times before Broadhead.
“It’s been like that for more than a year,” she said. “They should have rectified that a long time ago.”
The city Department of Environmental Protection has the responsibility to maintain the storm drain.
A DEP spokesman confirmed that someone called 311 on Sunday and Tuesday, but said the agency had no record of calls about the issue before Sunday.
Broadhead said she had to wait all day in the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center before she saw a doctor. It wasn’t until Monday morning that she finally got admitted, she said.
“When the doctors approached me, I told them I fell in a hole,” she said. “They started talking to me like I was drunk or on drugs. I wasn’t drunk or on drugs.”
Hospital officials declined to directly address Broadhead’s complaints.
“Due to patient privacy, we are not able to provide specific information,” a hospital spokeswoman said. “At Montefiore, patient care and safety are our highest priority.”
Broadhead stormed out of the hospital and went to see a doctor at a nearby clinic and got a prescription for pain medication.
When she called 311 to report the problem on Sunday, she said DEP officials told her they couldn’t find the hole.
“I don’t know why because I gave them specific information,” she said. “So I called back (Tuesday) and made another complaint and by about noon, they had fixed it.”
A DEP spokesman said the call came in on Sunday, for a broken catch basin — better known as a storm drain.
“The crew responded the same day but found no broken catch basins at that location, or the immediate vicinity,” the spokesman said.
“(There) were no prior calls to 311 concerning a broken catch basin at this location.”
DEP workers poured concrete into the hole and placed a board and safety cones on it.