The construction worker whose chest was slashed open in Friday’s deadly Upper East Side crane collapse is already on his feet, family and friends say.
Alexis “Andy” Simeone, a 31-year-old carpenter injured in the Friday accident that killed two fellow hardhats, spent yesterday visiting doctors and running errands, his family said. He was discharged from the hospital Sunday.
News of Simeone’s recovery comes as questions swirl around the last inspector to sign off on the crane – and as City Hall scrambled to put the finishing touches on a proposed overhaul of construction-safety guidelines.
“He’s lucky, he’s really lucky to be alive,” Simeone’s sister Emma told The Post from Grenada, where he grew up. “He said he didn’t know what hit him.”
Simeone, a married father of a 1-year-old daughter, was working inside the building to be known as The Azure on 335 E. 91st Street when the crane collapsed, taking him with it, according to his sister.
“The puncture was on his right side. Had it been on his left side, near his heart, he would have been gone,” said Brownsville neighbor and family friend John Stafford, 51.
Yesterday, Department of Buildings inspector Patrick McGarrigle, who checked the crane a week before the accident and reported nothing amiss, declined comment outside his East Brunswick, NJ, home.
“I can’t talk to you,” he said when asked about reports the crane may have had a faulty turntable connected to the cab and shoddy welds.
Meanwhile, construction worker Houssain Mosharrf , 52, died yesterday in a four-story fall from a scaffolding at a building at 789 St. Marks Ave. in Brooklyn.
(News Article from the New York Post)