The incident happened around 1:30 a.m. on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side. The 2-year-old boy's fall was broken by a trash bin before he hit the sidewalk.
Miraculously, the boy, Jayvin Cruz, suffered only bumps and bruises and was alert and awake as he was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where he is listed in stable condition.
Earl Boyd was sitting across the street at the time, and he reported hearing a startling thump.
"When I heard it, the baby had already hit [the trash bin] and came down," he said. "Then the ambulance came, and the baby was still crying. So I felt good, because if the baby's crying, at least the baby's still alive."
The boy's panicked grandmother was asleep at the time and had no idea the toddler was even awake.
"I opened my eyes, everybody's running and screaming, 'What happened? What happened?'" she said. "So I was running too."
The apartment has window guards on all the windows except one.
The question is, why was this one window in their apartment missing a window guard?
"It's the super's fault because he requested a window guard in the past," said upstairs neighbor Dennis Tejada. "Our super's really hard to get a hold of. We had a broken window in my apartment for like almost a year and a half. It took him forever to replace it. He's never around."
And when we caught up with the super, well, it was hard to catch up, as he ran away and refused to answer our questions about why he hadn't installed the window guards.
Police are investigating, but no criminality is suspected and no charges have been filed.
