The devastated father of a 2-year-old girl who died after she fell from a fifth-floor window of her family’s Bronx apartment said his child had only been unsupervised for a few moments — but that was all it took for tragedy to strike.
“Learn from me. It only takes a split second,” Chayanne Polanco, 36, told the Daily News. “All of us say we’re perfect parents, but all it takes is one error.”
Polanco’s daughter, Julia Cante Polanco-Wilcox fell from a rear window of her parents’ E. 138th St. apartment near St. Ann’s Ave. in Mott Haven around 10:47 p.m. Tuesday, cops said.
The heartbroken dad wasn’t home when the child fell out the window. NYPD investigators told him their precocious toddler had managed to open an accordion side panel of an air conditioner mounted in the window when she slipped through the crack.
His wife Thessa was checking her phone and vaping in the next room when the child squirmed through the opening and fell.
“She vaped and checked her phone; that’s when it happened,” the victim’s father said. ”She was in her room. It was only for a split second.”
“There is a fire escape near the living room, and I have caught her (going) halfway out, halfway into that, three times,” Polanco said. “(My wife) tried to go through the proper channels to install those window guards, ’cause it was a danger, you know?”
“(It) just never happened in time,” he said bitterly.
Polanco, who works at Duane Reade, was studying at Apex Technical School when the accident occurred. He learned of the fall from neighbors after returning home with dinner for his family.
An NYPD officer at the scene offered him a ride and rushed him to Harlem Hospital. But it was too late, he said. Julia had already died.
“All I wanted was to hold her,” Polanco said. “I just wanted to hold her one last time, because the last time I held her was to vote. For some reason, they wouldn’t let me. They told me no.”
“Tell them you love them (all the time),” he said, speaking to parents everywhere. “Because the last thing you wanna be is me, with a face full of pain to the point where you can’t even cry, because of how much you cried your tears out.”
Polanco admitted that his daughter was “super energetic” and spent her days exploring the apartment.
“She’ll wake up and try to burst out of the room,” Polanco said. “She will try to climb on any surface, and we’ll try to pry her right out.”
Polanco called his only child “little stink.”
“You know how toddlers poop their diapers,” he said. “That was my miracle child.”
“She enjoyed being on my shoulders. She enjoyed me just holding her. And sleeping on top of me.”
One neighbor recalled hearing the mother’s screams after she discovered her daughter unconscious on the ground below.
“We thought she was being attacked,” said the neighbor, who gave her name as Wanda M. “She kept saying, ‘My baby, my baby!” I asked her what happened, and I looked out the window. She was lying under my window.
“I started screaming, calling 911,” she added. “Everybody in my household started calling.”
Wanda said she was shocked by the girl’s injuries.
“She was barely breathing,” the neighbor said. “It was very shallow. She was bleeding from her face. She had a gash coming across the side of her face.”
Julia’s family is part of the Northern Arapaho and Oglala Lakota community, according to a GoFundMe created by her aunt, who is hoping to raise funds to send the little girl’s remains to South Dakota for burial.
“Right now, both of Julia’s parents are emotionally devastated, and our family is scrambling to gather the money needed to lay baby Julia to rest,” the victim’s aunt, Sameria Black Crow, wrote on GoFundMe. “This loss is so recent, and we are trying to navigate the pain of losing her while also facing the immediate costs that come with bringing her home and preparing for her funeral.”