ORANGE : Girl Badly Hurt in Fall From 2nd Story

A 3-year-old girl was in serious condition Monday evening after she tumbled out a second-floor bedroom window onto an asphalt alley.

The child, Diedre Anderson, had been playing with her two sisters in the rear bedroom of their apartment at 1449 E. Grove Ave. in Orange, when she apparently climbed on a bookshelf under the window, pulled open the window and pushed the screen, her mother Mindy Anderson said.

“I let them look out the window, but always with the window closed,” Anderson said at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana. “It wasn’t locked, but she had never opened it before--she didn’t get into things; she wasn’t a digger kid.”

The child suffered from blunt chest trauma and a fractured skull, a hospital spokeswoman said. “It still boggles my mind,” Anderson said.

A resident of the apartment complex said that he was moving his trailer when he turned and saw the child falling.

“At first she was out cold and then she started crying,” Don Benefield said. “When the paramedics came, they had to keep poking her to keep her awake.”

Anderson, who said she was in the living room when her daughter fell, said, “I didn’t know anything was wrong until the guy called me from outside. At first I looked out the front, and then I went in the bedroom and saw the window open.”

She and her husband, Vic Anderson, have lived in the apartment since February, when they moved from Phoenix.