The Harlem mother who leaped eight stories to her death with her 10-month-old son strapped to her chest left behind a heartbroken husband to make sense of her incomprehensible suicide.
Cynthia Wachenheim, 44, died but her body appears to have protected their infant son, Keston Bacharach, from hitting the ground directly.
“I’m sure you understand, I’m absolutely overwhelmed with grief,” her husband Hal
Bacharach, 48, toldThe New York Times.
James Keivom/New York Daily News
The Sutton apartment building on Bradford Ave. near 147th St., where Cynthia Wachenheim jumped from an 8th-floor window, with her infant son strapped to her. Wachenheim died, but the baby survived. Wachenheim left behind a 13-page suicide note in which she blamed herself for injuries her son had suffered.
Bacharach held his son close in the Harlem apartment he shared with his wife at The Sutton, a modern building at 147th St. and Bradhurst Ave., across the street from Jackie Robinson Park.
Before jumping, Wachenheim strapped Keston to herself in an Ergobaby carrier, but the infant bounced away as she hit the sidewalk. He miraculously survived with nothing more than a bruised cheek.
“I have my son, who was lucky enough to survive, in my lap,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. Right now my crying son is in my arms.”
James Keivom/New York Daily News
Attorney Cynthia Wachenheim, 44, was killed but her 10-month-old son survived after they both plummeted eight stories from the window of a Harlem apartment building on Wednesday.
Bacharach repeated certain phrases as if to process the gravity of what just happened — the shock of tragedy still fresh.
Wachenheim left behind a 13-page suicide note in which she blamed herself for “two shameful incidents,” when her son fell from a bed and a Gymini play set onto a wooden floor. She feared that these spills caused concussions and seizures and would one day lead to autism or cerebral palsy, according to the Times.
Nobody believed her, she said in the note, but she noticed changes in her child because she spends all day with him. She also wrote that what she was about to do is “evil.”
Bacharach’s mother said that Wachenheim had not been acting like herself lately.
Wachenheim was on child-care leave from her lucrative job as a court attorney, commanding $122,800 annually. She was well educated — high school valedictorian and Columbia University Law School graduate — and an active member of her Upper West Side synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun.
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