Questions remain after toddler survives 5-story fall from New York building

A 1-year-old boy survived a five-story drop from the window of a Bronx apartment building to the concrete pavement below as police investigate what led to the fall, cops said Saturday.

Cops initially took one person into custody for the incident at the scene, but he was later released without charges, officials said.

The toddler plummeted from the rear window of the building on Oak Terrace near Beekman Ave. in Mott Haven around 6:40 p.m. Friday, according to law enforcement.

A third-floor resident was sitting on his couch watching TV with his pit bull, Cain, when the toddler fell into the courtyard.

“I saw the shadow as he came down and I heard the sound, ‘Boom!’” the resident, who would only identify himself as Emmanuel, said. “It was a sound like a car crash, like a body hits the wall. My dog jumped up on the window sill, and that’s when I looked up and saw.”

“I thought it was garbage at first that someone threw out the window. People do that sometimes,” Emmanuel, 53, added.

Upon spotting the boy lying in an alley they couldn’t access, neighbors frantically began calling 911.

“I heard the baby crying and crying before anybody got there,” said Wilma Roman, who lives on the building’s ground floor. “I thought, ‘Where are the mother and father?’ And then the firefighters banged on my door. I looked out and I saw the baby lying there on the floor crying but not moving.”

When Roman, 64, peered out her window she spotted the boy lying on his back, one leg crossed over the other, on the concrete a few feet away. The tot only had on a small T-shirt and a diaper.

Responding firefighters struggled to get into the alley which was locked up and attempted to get to the boy through tenants’ windows.

“They were trying to get through my windows, but my (window) gates were locked,” Roman said. “They said, ‘There’s a baby out there and we can’t reach him!’ They were desperate. I started crying. I thought, ‘If that baby makes it, it’s a miracle.’”

A quick-thinking female firefighter managed to jump down into the alley from another window, then raced to open up the rear gate, letting medics rush in to work on the boy before they drove the child off in an ambulance.

“When they brought him out, his cries started to die down,” Roman recalled. “I thought, ‘Don’t tell me, this baby isn’t going to make it.’”

A woman who lives across the street came outside after hearing sirens to find a man pacing on the sidewalk outside the building, she said.

“He was pacing back and forth,” said the woman, who gave her name as Jane, 35. “There were no parents out here showing up. This is just heartbreaking.”

“I just hope the baby’s OK. As a parent, you hope everything to be OK. You don’t want something like that to happen,” Jane said.

Medics rushed the injured child to Harlem Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition. Cops said he suffered “serious injuries,” but is expected to survive.

It was not immediately clear how the child survived the fall. Concrete paving extends roughly 10 feet from the rear of the building to the fenced yard of another property, which contains a tree and other shrubbery.