The 2-year-old girl who tumbled to her death from a fifth-floor Bronx apartment window was a “super energetic” and “bubbly” kid who loved to climb, her grieving dad said Thursday.
Julia Cante Wilcox-Polanco was fiddling with the accordion divider supporting the window air conditioning unit in her Mott Haven apartment when she fell late Tuesday, landing unconscious in the alleyway.
Her dad, Chayanne Polanco, 36, said the anguish overtook him when he saw his daughter at Harlem Hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries.
“I saw my little stink, my JC, lifeless,” he said, using his two affectionate nicknames for his daughter. “All I wanted was to hold her. They told me no. They wouldn’t let me hold her. I just wanted to hold her one last time, ’cause the last time I held her was to vote.”
Polanco was at tech school, where he is studying to become an electrician, when little Julia fell from the family’s apartment on the top floor of the building on East 138th Street near St. Ann’s Avenue in Mott Haven around 10:45 p.m.
“This is what gets me mad, because it’s not like the area where she usually was,” Polanco said of his toddler daughter. “She normally would just run around it. It was the first time she was, like, curious about that accordion, and somehow…she got it open, and she pushed it right out.”
Julia’s energy often ran high, and she always wanted to climb or be picked up, her dad said.
“She was a very bubbly kid,” Polanco said. “If she was alive right now, she will be running back and forth from the apartment, trying to climb all things. And then, she’ll just look at me and raise her arms up and [say] she wants ‘uppies.’”
“She was super energetic,” he added. “She’ll wake up and try to burst out of the room…. She was trying to climb on any surface and we’ll try to pry her right out.”
Polanco’s wife – Julia’s mother – was home at the time but had briefly stepped into another room.
“She’s distraught. She’s distraught,” he said. “Because she’s having some kind of guilt, she could have gotten there faster, she could have just been in the room, taking better care.”
“All it takes is a split second,” he said. “There was nothing malicious.”
No criminality was suspected in the toddler’s deadly fall, police said.
“This is my first and only child,” Polanco said. “That was my miracle child.”
