Neighbors Mourn a Little Boy

As the early hours of Tuesday wore on, a weary Tammy Miller stared at her sleeping 7-year-old daughter and every so often gave her a soft nudge.

“I kept waking her up. I just wanted her to open her eyes, to reassure myself she was OK,” said Miller, quietly sobbing as she sat in an office of a Koreatown apartment building.

The night before, 3-year-old Anthony Allen had fallen to his death out of one of the building’s sixth-floor windows. It happened suddenly: As Anthony’s mother stepped away to prepare his bath, he reportedly leaned against a screen in the studio apartment. The screen popped out and he followed.

The loss of a child whom Miller had seen alive, exuberant, cheerfully playful only hours before shook her to the core.

“It makes you realize how fortunate we are when we come home and our kids are safe,” she said, crying.

That was the sentiment Tuesday throughout the Sherman Apartments as residents groped for some semblance of normalcy. At the red-gated brick building, people came and went--to work, from the stores around the corner on busy 3rd Street.

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If you held their eyes long enough they murmured only two words: “So sad.”

Many of the tenants in the 60-unit building knew Anthony and his mother, 20-year-old Priscilla Allen, who had moved in less than a year ago.

Police said the boy landed in a narrow passageway that leads to a basement boiler room. Neighbors said he was lying on his left side, with no visible injuries, after the fall.

Several neighbors said the boy appeared to be breathing and had a weak pulse. Paramedics arrived within minutes, but Anthony was pronounced dead at Childrens Hospital about 9:30 p.m.

His mother and neighbors who came to visit were always warning Anthony to stay away from the windows, Miller said. But he liked to look out.

There are no city requirements that windows on residential buildings be covered or otherwise secured, and it appears there were no violations of building codes, said Ernest Herrera, chief building inspector.

Allen is a single mother who struggled to hold down a job as a housekeeper while attending nursing school and caring for Anthony, a rambunctious, solidly built child who loved attention, neighbors said.

“He was a normal acting little kid, a 3-year-old--bing, they’re gone,” said Tom Christopher, who has managed the building in the 300 block of South Alexandria Avenue for 17 years.

Lisa Simmons was one of many neighbors from the building who made their way to Childrens Hospital Monday evening to ensure that Allen would not have to endure her pain alone.

Simmons said Allen was devastated.

“Me and Priscilla was about to get on the elevator recently and she was joking--with Anthony being so thick, she was going to have to find him a football league to join pretty soon,” Simmons remembered.

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Mesha Tyree, another close friend, said she talked to Allen early Tuesday.

“She’s taking it badly, her only child,” she said. “She says she doesn’t know what she’s going to do without her son. I don’t think she really believes yet that it happened.”

It is still almost impossible for Miller to believe as well. She lives one floor below Allen, directly under the apartment from which Anthony fell. The thought that the boy must have passed her window will tear at her heart for a long time, she said.

“I feel like if I had been near the window and heard something, if I could have stuck my hand out and grabbed his shirt, even just to break the fall, I could have done something,” she said tearfully. “Now, every time we look up we’re going to know a baby fell.”