White Oak woman recounts terror of 2 kids tumbling from 3rd-floor window

Two White Oak children might owe their lives to Andi Cartwright’s busted pair of Bluetooth headphones.

Skies were sunny and temperatures lingered in the mid-80s last Monday afternoon as Cartwright strolled down Ohio Avenue in the Mon Valley town she’s called home for 22 years. As she walked, listening to music to perk up her heart rate, her headphones suddenly stopped working.

“All right, I’ll listen to the birds,” she remembered thinking.

About 15 seconds later, the marketing and front-of-house manager for Irwin’s Lamp Theatre paused near the former Lincoln School, a tree-­shaded, century-old building that had been converted into apartments.

“As I’m looking at the front of this building, I heard this thud to my right,” said Cartwright, 59. “I knew immediately what it was.”

A boy — Quinton “Quin” Stephens — had fallen 30 feet from his family’s third-floor apartment window, hitting his head on the way down on a plant stand.

Naked and bleeding, 6-year-old Quin tried to stand but couldn’t. He silently started squirming toward the roadway; Cartwright said she later learned the boy has autism and is nonverbal.

Cartwright started screaming, then quickly called 911.

“As I was calling 911, I thought, ‘Oh my God, if I had my music on … I would have never heard him hit the ground. I would’ve walked right past,’ ” Cartwright said. “If I was five minutes earlier through there, if I was five minutes later through there, I would have missed all that.”

‘My babies! My babies!’

As Cartwright talked in panicky tones with a 911 dispatcher on her cellphone, she held Quin as loosely as she could to prevent further injury. She didn’t know how badly he was hurt. She also didn’t want him to wander onto Lincoln Way, a busy thoroughfare just a block away.

Then Cartwright saw a girl — the boy’s sister, Elody, who turned 4 the day after the accident — peeking her head out of a windowpane three stories up. Cartwright said the pane of glass was missing from the window through which the girl was peering.

“Please, honey — don’t jump!” Cartwright pleaded with the girl. “Go back in the room!”

She didn’t appear to understand. Cartwright said she later learned that Elody, too, has autism and is nonverbal.

As Cartwright dropped to her knees, trying to gently hold and comfort Quin, she turned and saw that Elody had fallen, too, from the third-floor window. Cartwright saw her hit a cement wall, black out and go limp.

“Oh my God!” Cartwright, now covered in blood and Quin’s sweat, screamed at the 911 dispatcher. “She’s dead! She’s dead!”

Cartwright quickly surveyed her surroundings: The streets were empty, and no neighbors were in their yards.

They were alone.

“It could’ve been two minutes,” she told TribLive this week. “It felt like it was 15.”

Cartwright flagged down a U.S. Postal Service vehicle down the block. A mail carrier leaped out, confused.

Within moments, White Oak police arrived, Cartwright said.

Tyler Jefferson, the children’s father, bolted out of the front door of the apartment building and jumped off the steps, Cartwright said.

“My babies! My babies!” Cartwright heard their mother, Sabrina Stephens, scream as she ran outside.

Cartwright said she heard the parents tell police they were napping inside their apartment with their third child, baby Joshua.

Paramedics rushed the two children to UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, Elody by helicopter. Quin and Elody arrived in critical condition. Police told TribLive both had been upgraded to stable condition by Thursday.

Each of the children had a fractured pelvis, Jefferson told WPXI after the accident. Quin also broke his leg, and Elody suffered a collapsed lung.

Allegheny County Police are investigating.

Jefferson on Thursday said he and his wife don’t want to talk about the incident.

“We won’t be doing interviews at this time,” he wrote in a text to TribLive. “All of our focus needs to be on our children right now.”

New entry

White Oak EMS Chief Paul Falavolito heard Cartwright’s 911 call on the scanner at 3:15 p.m.

His crews were out on calls, he said, but he and two EMS deputy chiefs — all of them paramedics — jumped into their service vehicles and sped toward the Lincoln School Apartments, just six blocks from the White Oak EMS ambulance bay.

Falavolito ran onto the apartment’s lawn, quickly trying to size up the situation. A White Oak police officer was leaning over Quin.

Then he saw Elody, limp and draped face-down over a nearby wall. He carefully lifted the toddler and took her into his arms. It was clear she had suffered “tremendous injury” to her back and side, Falavolito said.

Falavolito immediately thought of his CPR training. He maneuvered the girl gently in his arms — always supporting her neck — so her airway would open.

“I’ll be honest with you, I thought she was dead,” Falavolito, 53, told TribLive. “While I held her, though, she opened her eyes — and started screaming.”

Falavolito lay Elody in the grass nearby and started a trauma assessment. It was cut short by paramedics from the arriving ambulances, who rushed the kids to Children’s.

Falavolito grew up in Green Tree and moved to White Oak after joining its EMS team as a paramedic some 26 years ago. On Monday, he said, he added a new entry to his most memorable calls in the borough.

“Ninety-seven percent of our calls we can fairly predict what they are, what they’re gonna be,” he said. “But this is one of those high-profile, low-frequency calls. This is a once-every-10-years call.”

“This is a call,” he said, “that’s going to stick out in our minds for a very, very long time.”

Their last $150

Kelly Doyle heard news about the falls and wanted to help.

The McKeesport native, who recently moved to an East End suburb after living for 10 years in White Oak, had formed a food bank — the McKeesport Agape Center — in her garage in 2019.

An anonymous donor turned her desire to feed those in need into a full-time job. About four years ago, someone she never met heard about her food-bank aspirations.

So they sent her $155,000 through PayPal.

During the covid-19 pandemic, Doyle used the money to buy a 13,000-square-foot building on White Oak’s Prescott Street, near Penn State University’s Greater Allegheny campus, to grow the Agape Center.

She said she started a “concierge service” to deliver food six days a week to anyone within a 10-mile radius of the food bank, which also carries pet food, clothing and necessary household goods.

As of Monday, Doyle said she was serving 1,200 families — she calls them “Agape neighbors” — every month, including the Stephens family.

Doyle heard about the falls through Cartwright, an old friend who serves on the food bank’s board.

Doyle quickly launched a GoFundMe campaign to help the Stephenses. As of Friday afternoon, 45 donors had raised $3,330 toward a $10,000 goal.

“Quinton and Elody fell 30 feet out of the third-story window while they were supposed to be napping,” Doyle wrote on the website. “Miraculously, they survived.”

“The parents need to move, and they also have to stay in a hotel,” Doyle told TribLive. “They were down to their last $150, and the hotel by the hospital is $145 a night.”

Money for the family is tight, Doyle said. The children’s mother just started a job at a bakery the same day the kids fell out of the window, she said.

“This is such an extreme situation,” Doyle said. “They are a deserving family. They are a loving family. They love their kids.”

Building repairs

At least two people who identified themselves as subcontractors were hard at work Friday morning at Lincoln School Apartments when a TribLive reporter visited.

One worker, who wouldn’t give his name, said Brandywine Communities, which manages the apartments, hired them to do concrete work on the building’s front steps and other tasks. Signs reading “wet paint” and “Use side door” were posted nearby.

The entrance, in addition to several window frames, got a fresh coat of espresso-brown paint this week, said the worker, as two cherrypickers sat idle on the property.

From the street in front of the building, wooden window frames that didn’t get new paint appeared to be crumbling. Part of the roofline, near a gutter, was falling apart.

White Oak has launched an investigation into potential code violations at Lincoln School Apartments, said code officer John Snelson, who visited the site Friday.

He declined further comment.

That same day, the scene still had yellow police tape draped between metal railings and two of the 19 evergreen trees towering between the old school and Ohio Avenue.

Falavolito, the EMS chief, said crews turned out to the old school en masse Tuesday, a day after the children fell.

“I’ve never seen more construction equipment on scene,” Falavolito said. “They were out there replacing the windows like you wouldn’t believe.”

A North Versailles-based corporation named Lincoln School Associates purchased the building and its roughly 1-acre lot on Feb. 8, 1988, for $50,000, according to online Allegheny County real estate records.

Brandywine Communities, which also has an office in North Versailles, manages the building’s one- and two-bedroom apartments, with rents starting at $760 and $875 a month, respectively, according to the company’s website.

Brandywine manages 26 apartment “communities” within a 25-mile radius of Pittsburgh, its website said.

Lincoln School Apartments is an outlier in a neighborhood where residents take pride in their homes, said Cartwright, who lives a few blocks from the school. Most lawns in front of Ohio Avenue’s one- and two-story homes, many of them set in brick, are green and well-manicured.

Cartwright stopped at the building Friday and said Brandywine’s efforts to upgrade the site were too little, too late.

Brandywine Communities did not return multiple phone calls and emails this week seeking comment.

Also not responding to requests for comment were its president, John J. Katz, and ShaDrae King, the person Brandywine lists on its website as a Lincoln School Apartments contact.

‘Crazy’ timeline

Cartwright doesn’t know why her Bluetooth headphones cut out, all but ensuring she would hear the children’s falls.

Other unusual details made the incident feel like even more of an odd coincidence to the White Oak woman.

It happened on a Monday, when Cartwright doesn’t work, she said. And she took the walk in the afternoon, while on her days off she usually walks in the morning or evening, to either start or end the day.

“It’s just crazy how the timeline led me to that point, to be there,” Cartwright said. “I am just thankful for that.”

Cartwright said she’s not religious. She admits she’s felt embarrassed this week when people have told her things like “You’re an angel.”

“Who am I to say there’s not some force at play with everything?” she said, with a smile. “There are things which are beyond our understanding. And this was one of them.”