With concern about security at the World Trade Center tower growing, a group of daredevils who parachuted off the skyscraper last year turned themselves in to the police on Monday afternoon, with one saying that the stunt had exposed the need for more vigilance at the city's tallest tower.
'We just kind of walked in,' Andrew Rossig, 33, one of the parachutists, said before going with his lawyer to the First Precinct station house in Lower Manhattan. 'It's supposed to be the most secure building in the world. God forbid it was somebody else getting in there with a real intention to harm New Yorkers.'
Three of the men climbed to the top of the 1,776-foot tower at 1 World Trade Center at 3 a.m. on Sept. 30 and leapt off, while a fourth man kept watch below, defense lawyers said.
The three men opened parachutes and floated silently through the dark to land on West Street near Vesey Street. A security guard at the Goldman Sachs building spotted them folding up their chutes and called the police.
Security concerns at the tower have grown since last week, when a 16-year-old boy, Justin Casquejo, managed to slip through a fence onto the site at 4 a.m., climb a scaffold, take an elevator to the 88th floor and sneak past a security guard to the roof. He then climbed the building's metal spire. Two hours later he was arrested in the building's lobby.
Unlike the teenager, Mr. Rossig and his companions - James Brady, Marco Markovich and Kyle Hartwell - evaded capture. It took more than four months for the police to track them down, prompting their admissions.
Timothy Parlatore, a lawyer for Mr. Rossig, said the men had climbed the stairs of the 104-floor building without encountering any security guards. The building, which is next to the site of the Sept. 11 attack, is still under construction.
In January, detectives identified some of the men and obtained warrants to search their homes. The searches turned up videotapes the men had filmed of the stunt with cameras in their helmets, Mr. Parlatore said.
Since then, lawyers for the men have been negotiating with prosecutors; they said they expected the men to be charged with trespassing and with burglary, under the legal theory that they entered the building to commit a crime.
An official with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the incident was still under criminal investigation, said one of the parachutists, Mr. Brady, 32, was an iron worker for DCM Erectors who had been given a security card and had access to the site.
But Mr. Brady's lawyer, Andrew Mancilla, said his client no longer worked for the construction company and had not used a key card to enter. The three parachutists had slipped in through a hole in the fence, covered with a tarp, he said. 'The Port Authority is spreading misinformation in an attempt to avoid blame,' he said.
Mr. Rossig and Mr. Brady were described by their lawyers as experienced, amateur sky divers who also sought thrills leaping from buildings, bridges and other structures. They were arrested in December 2012 for attempting to jump from a tower at Co-op City in the Bronx, the Bronx Times reported. Mr. Markovich is a professional sky-diving instructor in New Jersey, according to his lawyer, Joseph Corozzo. 'He's just looking to be treated fairly and not to be made some political scapegoat,' Mr. Corozzo said.
Mr. Rossig described his descent from the top of the World Trade Center as 'exhilarating.'
'It's a fair amount of free fall time,' he said. 'You really get to enjoy the view of the city and see it from a different perspective.'
Posted by Unknown on Monday, March 24, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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