Suzanne Hart of Young & Rubicam killed in Manhattan elevator accident

41-year-old victim mangled on Madison Ave

he body of advertising director Suzanne Hart is wheeled out of her Madison Ave. office building.

A go-getter at one of the city’s top advertising agencies died a gruesome death Wednesday moments after she did what millions of New Yorkers do countless times each day — step inside an elevator.
On her way to her job at Young & Rubicam, Suzanne Hart marched across the tiled lobby of the landmark 285 Madison Ave. building and stepped into an elevator around 10 a.m., joining a man and a woman inside.
She was barely inside the compartment — the doors hadn’t even closed — when it suddenly shot up 20 feet or so to just below the second floor.
In an instant, Hart, 41, who still had one foot out, was pulled up the shaft where she became wedged between the elevator and the wall — and had the life crushed out of her.
The man on the elevator made a wild grab for Hart but it was too late, said fire Lt. Glenn Berube of Rescue 1. The female passenger could only watch in horror.
Lee Trice, an art director, was riding in another elevator when the accident happened.
“I was going up in the elevator. I heard a loud crash. Then I heard the alarm,” Trice said. “Someone was pressing the alarm. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Next, “the building security pried one of the elevator doors open and you could see the empty shaft,” said a worker, who declined to give his name. “The top of the entrance to the elevator was cracked and you could see the debris. There were ruined Christmas wreaths on the floor.”
A co-worker who arrived at the scene just after the accident said “it looked like a grenade went off in there.”
Arriving firefighters found the top of the elevator visible from the second-floor doors, and they quickly used clamps to prevent it from sliding further up — as it is designed to do when there is a malfunction — or slip back down.
Then they lowered a ladder down into the compartment to retrieve the two survivors.
“He was crying,” said Berube, who helped rescue them both. “She looked like she was convulsing. It was very traumatic for her.”
The survivors were taken to N!YU Langone Medical Center, where they were treated for psychological trauma.
Hart’s body was removed from the building hours later. A firefighter described it as “mangled up really bad.”


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