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Fox News reports, Carrie O’Connor, a Boston University professor, was crushed to death by an elevator in her apartment building.
While O’Connor was carrying a 7-and-a-half-foot-tall box, it accidentally hit a switch that sent the elevator plummeting to the base level while the door was still open.
The French Professor was found pinned between the elevator and the wall of the elevator shaft.
Isnpector Martin Guiod, that the 60-year-old elevator was was “birdcage” style lift that requires the occupant to close the gate manually.
Guiod said the elevator did not malfunction during the accident.
“I heard someone that was bringing in a package out in the hallway, and then I heard an ungodly scream,” resident Leanne Scorzoni shared.
“Then we ran out into the hallway, and we saw a gentleman who was obviously in distress. He was screaming and hyperventilating, saying, ‘She’s dead! She’s dead!’
An autopsy revealed that O’Connor died of “traumatic asphyxiation.”
From Fox News:
Inspectors reviewed video from inside O’Connor’s building that showed her trying to move the nearly 80-pound package into the elevator, The Boston Globe reported.
While she was inside the lift, a maintenance person in the basement pressed the call button — signaling to the system to send the elevator down as soon as the interior gate was closed, according to the report.
Footage showed the package then bumping the car gate switch — mistakenly indicating that the door was closed — and the elevator began to drop with the interior gate open.
As O’Connor lost control of the box, it slipped off the switch, halting the elevator’s descent. But when she then lifted the package again, according to the video, it hit the switch once more.
She then disappeared from view on the footage, indicating “that she had fallen backwards into the hoistway between the 1st floor and basement floor,” the report said.
