DIPLO DEATH DROP
Boozy Aussie slips through pal’s hands, plunges from 7th floor in ‘trust game’
AN AUSTRALIAN diplomat plunged to his death from his seventh-floor terrace in Manhattan early Wednesday while playing a high-risk game that went horribly wrong, cops said.
“I will prove that you can trust me,” Julian Simpson, 30, told a friend as he leaned over his Lower East Side ledge, according to police sources. “Let’s play the trust game.” The friend, James Waugh, told police he held out his arm to catch Simpson, but the drunken diplomat lost his grip and toppled over the ledge about 1:35 a.m., sources said.
Simpson landed on a second-story landing outside the building on Clinton St. near E. Houston St.
He was pronounced dead at the scene of what cops are treating as an accident.
“It is a tragedy. Our hearts go out to his family,” Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in an interview on a Down Under morning show.
“I can’t provide any more details at this stage. It’s a shocking tragedy – a young life lost.”
The incident capped what had been a jovial evening for Simpson and his pals.
The diplomat went out to dinner with his wife and friends before returning to his apartment for a nightcap.
The group trekked to his rooftop to take in the view of the Empire State Building, which was lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the passage of gay marriage legislation in Australia.
While they drank outside, Simpson led Waugh’s wife, who is also an Australian diplomat, to a higher landing and twirled her around — apparently scaring her, sources said.
They all eventually returned to his apartment where Waugh confronted Simpson and asked him to step outside, sources said.
Out on his terrace, Simpson told Waugh that he never meant to scare the man’s wife.
To prove his word, Simpson allegedly suggested they play the trust game, leading to his fatal plunge.
A building resident said he was awakened by a loud commo- tion about 1:30 a.m.
The man looked out his window and saw paramedics crowding around a bloody body, performing CPR.
Fellow diplomats expressed shock over Simpson’s death.
“RIP my dear friend, Julian Simpson. Shocked and saddened,” Tajikistan diplomat Jonibek Hikmatov wrote on Facebook. “My prayers go to the Australian mission to the UN and his family.”
Sources said the Manhattan district attorney’s office has been told of the investigation, but no charges are expected.
Simpson served as Australia’s second secretary to the United Nations. A call to the Australian Mission to the UN was not returned.
In 2016, Simpson was among a group of diplomats who spoke to Australian students at the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development in New York. “We talked about working in foreign affairs and the nature of starting a career as a young diplomat,” one of the students was quoted as saying.
“Second Secretary Julian Simpson, then told us about how he began his career in foreign affairs from a media background, as well as offering some tips and tricks of the trade.”