NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- An assistant building superintendent was crushed to death by an elevator as he was trying to retrieve a tenant’s fallen cell phone in Brooklyn Friday afternoon, the NYPD said.
The 64-year-old assistant superintendent went into the elevator machine room in the basement of a building on Parkside Avenue, near Flatbush Avenue, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens around 1:30 p.m. on Friday along with a tenant whose phone had dropped into the elevator pit, police and a Department of Buildings spokesperson said.
While the two were inside the elevator machine room, someone called the elevator to a different floor, at which point the assistant superintendent was “caught in the moving hoist ropes and elevator sheave,” the spokesperson said.
The man was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the NYPD said. The tenant was also injured in the incident, the DOB spokesperson said, but the extent of the tenant’s injuries wasn’t immediately clear.
The NYPD didn’t immediately release the assistant superintendent’s name.
Both the DOB’s investigation and a police investigation are ongoing.