Frantic good Samaritans desperately tried to rescue the screaming grandmother who fell down an open Manhattan manhole — with one even lowering himself down to see if she could grab his legs to pull herself out.
The witnesses sprang into action late Monday after seeing Donike Gocaj, 56, suddenly falling from sight down the 10-foot hole outside Cartier on Fifth Avenue late Monday — while hearing her “screaming that she was dying,” recalled Carl Wood, who immediately called 911 after watching her fall.
“One guy actually sat down on top of the hole and they tried to lower him into the hole,” Woods told The Post of the tragically doomed rescue efforts.
“We had tried to lift him down … trying to get her to grab his legs,” Woods recalled.
“But she was too far down.”
Other witnesses frantically ran to their cars to get anything they could use to get Gocaj out of the uncovered Con Edison maintenance hole, located near 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue, as they anxiously waited for first responders to arrive.
One person even “got a ladder” — but it was also “too short” to reacher the screaming grandma, Wood recalled.
EMS arrived “in just a couple minutes” but “they couldn’t do anything, so they just got a stretcher and put it by the hole,” Wood said of the harrowing scenes.
Firefighters arrived moments later, but “by the time they arrived on the scene, I didn’t even hear her screaming anymore.”
They removed her from the hole less than half an hour later, he said.
Gocaj, a mom and grandmother from Briarcliff Manor in Westchester County, was taken to New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has yet to determine her cause of death.
Wrappers for burn sheets used to cover burn victims were still visible on the ground Tuesday morning, hours after the tragic incident.
Gocaj plummetted about 10-15 feet into the open manhole after stepping out of her parked Mercedes-Benz SUV around 11:20 p.m. Monday night in front of the flagship Cartier store. Wood said there were no cones or barriers around the hole at the time.
While the fall wasn’t that far, Wood said it seemed like it was incredibly hot in the hole and that Gocaj appeared to be “in a puddle of water.”
“When the FDNY was going down, they were wearing a mask. And when one of them came up, when he took his mask off, he was sweating a lot. So I know it was very hot down there,” he said.
Con Edison said video footage shows that the manhole cover, which was found just feet away from the gaping hole, was dislodged by a truck just 12 minutes before Gocaj fell.
“We are reviewing the details, and while this is a rare occurrence, manhole covers can get displaced by heavy vehicles. Our thoughts remain with her family, and safety remains our top priority.”
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