3rd baby in 3 months dies after being tossed from NYC window

Oct. 15, 2015: A police officer leaves an apartment building in the Bronx borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

NEW YORK – A 6-month-old girl died Thursday after being tossed from a sixth-floor window of an apartment building, witnesses and police said, the third child killed that way in the city in three months.

The New York Police Department said a 27-year-old woman believed to be the infant's mother was in the Bronx apartment with four children at the time. The three other children — a 10-year-old boy, an 8-year-old girl and a 3-year-old girl — were taken to a hospital but were not injured, police said.

The woman was taken from the home in the Fordham Heights neighborhood to a hospital for an evaluation. No charges have been filed. Police identified her as Tenisha Fearon.

The Fire Department said a call came in about a child outside a window shortly before 2 p.m. at the building on Tiebout Street.

The baby was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead, police said.

A witness told WABC that Fearon had been dangling the child outside of the window.

"And then that's when the neighbors started screaming, 'No, no, no, no!'" Lizette Rodriguez said. "They were yelling at her: 'Don't do it! Think about it.'"

Rodriguez said the woman said, "'I'm going to throw the baby out the window,' and the woman was screaming, 'We're all gonna die!' And that's when I figured, OK, this is time to call 911." She said she heard the baby hit the ground while she was dialing.

Gregorio Lopez, who lives next door to Fearon, said he heard a commotion Thursday afternoon in the hallway and a man yelling, "Please God, please help us!"

Lopez said he didn't want to leave his apartment because he didn't know what was happening but went to the roof after the man left. When he arrived there, he looked into his neighbor's window.

"I saw her naked and the three kids naked and I thought they were all dead," Lopez said. "And then she jumps up and starts hitting the window."

Lopez shouted down to some women on the street to call 911. "I was yelling 'Hurry up!' I thought she was going to throw the rest."

Officers from the NYPD's elite Emergency Service Unit had to take down the door because Fearon wouldn't open it, police said.

Pauline Bryan, who knew Fearon from the neighborhood, said she had just seen her on Tuesday outside the building.

"I can't believe this," she said. "She never told me she had problems. She's not a mother like that. May God help her."

Carol Watson, who lives in the building, told The New York Times that she knew the woman to be protective of her children.

"Something must have snapped," Watson said. "She was a good mother and very protective of those children. All I can tell you is that something must have snapped. She must have had a breakdown or something."

Last month, a newborn girl with her umbilical cord still attached was found dead outside an apartment building in the University Heights section of the borough. Authorities arrested her mother on murder and manslaughter charges, saying she hid her pregnancy and threw the child to her death from a seventh-story window shortly after giving birth.

In August, police arrested a Queens woman in connection with the death of her 1-month-old son. According to court papers, she told authorities an evil spirit had possessed the boy and she was "stopping the pain" when she threw him from the fourth-floor window. Investigators were looking into whether postpartum depression was a factor, but no clinical diagnoses had been made.