Baby-savers
Girl, 5, a hero after tot falls & hits awning
A QUICK-THINKING 5-yearold girl and her baby-sitter are being hailed as heroes after a toddler survived a five-story fall and landed on an awning outside of their Bronx building.
Little Michaella Mui and her sitter heard a thunderous noise from their second floor apartment Friday.
When the kindergartner looked out her bedroom window she saw a stunned and crying 2-year-old girl staring back at her.
“She fell right there,” Michaella told the Daily News, pointing out her window at the green canvas canopy over the front door of the co-op. “We were all in the living room watching TV and me and my baby sister heard a really loud boom.”
Katarina Charles, 24, Michaella’s neighbor and sometimes nanny, initially brushed off the loud bang.
“Michaella asked, ‘Did you hear that noise?’ and I said ‘Don’t worry about it,’ ” Charles recalled. “She comes back in screaming, ‘There’s a girl on the green thing!’ And I got up and saw the girl.”
Charles quickly snapped the window open and pulled the toddler to safety as the little girl’s horrified father, who ran out of the building after she fell, looked on from below.
Michaella watched in horror as Charles reached outside in the rain to grab the child.
“I was super scared,” Michaella said. “Me and my baby sister were crying that (the baby) was about to fall but she didn’t.”
Little Audrianna Dzyuba had plunged from her parent’s apartment, five floors above. Her cousin had opened the usually shuttered window to listen to the rain. Audrianna, who often sits on the sill of the window, tumbled out.
“The cops were saying kids fall from three stories and die immediately, some bigger than her,” stunned mom Kelley Dzyuba, 31, said Saturday. “It was incredible but very, very scary and terrifying.”
The tyke suffered only a bruise on her right arm after landing on the canopy .
The 20-foot-long metalribbed overhang stretches only 8 feet across the sidewalk in front of the Mosholu Ave. building.
“She is a miracle baby,” said father Alex Dzyuba, 31, who was filled with gratitude for his hero downstairs neighbors.
“I’m thankful,” the dad said. “I tried to climb up the awning to get her but it was too high.”
The Dzyubas only moved to the Riverdale apartment six months ago and said they were unaware they had to notify their landlord that they needed window guards to protect Audrianna and her 4-year-old brother Vinny.
Building residents showed The News a notice from the landlord about the safety bars coincidentally sent out only hours before the near-tragedy.
“The window guards are going up,” Kelley Dzyuba said.