RAISING DOUBT
Elevator horror haunts mechanic
THE MECHANIC who worked on an elevator that later crushed an advertising executive can’t get the image of her trapped body out of his mind.
Breaking his silence for the first time, mechanic Michael Hill told the Daily News he dreams of the horrifying day when the midtown elevator suddenly lurched upward, killing Suzanne Hart.
“You just keep thinking about seeing that poor woman,” said Hill, his voice cracking. “I picture it every day.”
Hill insists he has been wrongly accused in the Dec. 14 incident and said investigators are downplaying evidence of other bizarre problems with the fateful lift.
And more than three months later, officials still don't know precisely what happened, a troubling scenario given that nearly all of the elevators at 285 Madison Ave. are back in service.
“I don't think that elevator should ever be turned on again,” he said. “I worry very much about those (other) elevators. Until I know precisely what happened it would be a mistake” to use any of them.
Hill found himself on the defensive last month when the city said the fact that the elevator moved while the door was open “suggests” the lift’s safety system was bypassed by a “jumper wire“in the control room.
The city’s version of events was that Hill apparently forgot to remove the jumper wire that he used while his co-workers were adjusting the car’s speed.
Minutes after they had finished, the elevator was returned to service and Hart was killed as she stepped inside and the lift suddenly jerked upwards, crushing her between the cab and the wall.
Hill insists he used the jumper wire for only a few seconds to allow his co-workers access to the top of elevator No. 9.
He said he simply inserted the green U-shaped wire into two holes in the circuit board, held it in place for a few seconds while he moved the car downward, then removed it once his coworkers were in place.
He said he couldn’t have left it in place because he held it in his hands the entire time and did not physically attach the bare ends of the wire to the board. The co-workers said they fixed the cab and reset the car to “automatic,” which would bar the car from moving if the doors were open.
He also noted that he was the one who told investigators about the jumper wire in the first place.
“There’s no doubt in my mind” he removed it, he said. “Sadly, there’s still no doubt in my mind and I still can’t figure out what happened.”
He said after his co-workers put elevator No. 9 back in service, they told him by radio they were going to take a break.
A few minutes later, one of them called back, frantically screaming, “Somebody is stuck in the car and the building is very upset. There’s something wrong. Get down here.”
“I thought someone was stuck in the car. When I got downstairs, the doors opened and I could clearly see the door ajar.”
A co-worker told him “something horrible happened and it doesn’t look good. I went
and looked up the shaftway door.
“I looked up and I was able to see Miss Hart approximately 20 feet up.
“Physically, I felt sick. Weak,” he recalled. “My first thought was I’d like to get up there and see if we can do anything for her. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead.
“From what I saw from beneath I should have realized she was already gone,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine what had happened. That would take a lot of force. The steel doorframe was bent. Something like that would take a lot of force.”
For the next 12 hours, Hill and his co-workers stayed in the building, trying to help the fire department and Emergency Services Unit retrieve Hart’s body.
“Everybody who’s there is a family man. It’s just a strange feeling of being held back, unable to help. You just keep thinking about seeing that poor woman.”
Sitting down with The News, Hill said he wants to talk with Hart’s family and show them everything he knows about what happened.
“I would do everything I could to help them,” he said.
Hart’s family declined to comment about the incident.
Since the city report was released in February, Hill was fired from his job and has been unable to find work; meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney is reviewing the findings to see if criminal charges are warranted.
Hill — who has spent 28 of his 47 years in the elevator business — said potential reasons for the disaster can be found in an internal report by Lerch Bates, a consultant the city hired to test elevator No. 9.
Lerch Bates said the jumper wire theory is the “most likely” scenario, but the report also found elevator No. 9 acted erratically when a two-way radio was keyed near the elevator’s electronic control panel.
The radio’s signal sent the car zooming downwards in several tests, the report states. Hill notes that many elevator control rooms have warning signs to keep two-way radios out; 285 Madison had no such sign.
The report also noted that a “panic motion” switch in the computerized section of the control panel had been switched to “off” on elevator No. 9.
Both of these findings, he said, raise troubling questions about what caused Hart’s death.
“I’ve always told my kids elevators do not move when the doors are open,” he said. “In just a few seconds, it destroyed 28 years of everything I believed was a fact.”