Quick Take:
Police shut down a stretch of downtown Santa Cruz Saturday after a man fatally fell from a window at the Palomar Inn onto a busy Pacific Avenue. The death remains under investigation.
Yellow police tape and flashing blue and red lights shut down a central part of downtown Santa Cruz on Saturday afternoon after witnesses say a man fatally fell from a high window at the Palomar Inn onto the busy Pacific Avenue sidewalk.
Jay Pastick, a downtown busker who set up just outside the Verizon store, told Lookout that around 2:30 p.m. he was leaving the Palomar Inn after a quick bathroom break when he felt something forcefully hit his arm.
“As soon as I got past the edge of [the awning], I thought something fell off the building and hit me, boom, boom, and then I look and a body is right there,” said Pastick, whose leg and foot were still stained with bloody debris.
“You’re so lucky he didn’t land on you, he would have broke your neck,” a passerby told Pastick after a police officer suggested he go to the hospital.
“There would have been two dead people,” Pastick said.
Asked by multiple people, “what happened?” one officer at the scene responded: “gravity.”
It’s unclear how or why the person fell from the building. Multiple police officers at the scene declined to answer questions from Lookout, and offered no immediate details, saying it would be “a while” before they disseminated information.
Police did not immediately return Lookout’s phone calls and declined to comment in a texted statement from public information officer Katie Lee. “Due to the ongoing investigation we have no additional details at this time.” As of 8 p.m. the Santa Cruz Police Department had not issued a public statement about the incident.
Over the next two hours, crowds grew and dwindled at the edges of the police line, blocking off roughly 70 yards of Pacific Avenue and its sidewalks between the Avatar store and Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting. The thin yellow sheet draped over the body intermittently lifted with the afternoon breeze, and remained visible to the hundreds, if not thousands, of people nearby for more than an hour until the coroner blocked the scene with opaque fencing. Passersby gasped, cried and cursed when they recognized what lay underneath the sheet.
Just past the body, the Hat Co.’s burgundy awning hung, dislodged — it was the only obstacle between the column of windows riding up the seven-story Palomar Inn and the sidewalk. The windows for the top three stories were all open. Down the sidewalk, Pastick was back to playing guitar and belting out a duet of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”
Kaya Moon, a sidewalk vendor who’s been selling silver rings and jewelry on weekends to Pacific Avenue patrons for four years, said she believes the person fell out of the window. Moon was set up directly across the street from the Palomar Inn Saturday.
Since she sells with her back to Pacific Avenue, she did not see the person fall, she only heard the impact, which “sounded like a car crash.” However, a few minutes prior, she said she saw someone sitting on the ledge of one of the higher windows, their back facing Pacific Avenue, and sticking out enough that Moon remembers thinking “that’s pretty far out to be leaning, but people do crazy shit here all the time. It’s Santa Cruz.”
“One of my customers who was trying on a ring saw all of it. She ran over right away to check if he was still breathing, she said he was still breathing but not for long,” Moon said. She said she walked over and saw the body and the surrounding mess.
As a coroner lifted the body into a van and police scrubbed the remaining red stains from the sidewalk, a man rolled up to the police tape on his bike. He was at least the second person to remark that this was the third time since 1979, as far as they could remember, that someone died by falling from a Palomar Inn window. The last person, he said, didn’t make it to the sidewalk, hitting the inn’s solid awning above the first floor.
One older man, who identified himself only as Thomas, walked out of the Palomar Inn while police were still surveying the scene. He told Lookout he’s lived in the building for a total of nine years, on and off.
“We’ve had people jump out the window before, right on this street here,” Thomas said. He said he just returned as a tenant to the building this week after spending the last three years in Santa Barbara. He’s unsure if he will stay. “This place here is the cheapest place I can get. It’s halfway clean. It’s not the best place, but it’s not the worst place.
“There’s always something going on.”