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I watched the Rey Rivera episode of #UnsolvedMysteries last weekend. I lived in the Belvedere Hotel at the time of his death. The episode jogged my memory of the day I looked out my 8th floor window & saw a hole in the adjacent roof...
I was pretty sure I snapped a photo of it because it was such an odd sight. Went into the basement to retrieve the old PC and - after some Win2K pw recovery efforts - found what I was looking for.
That photo was taken on May 25, 2006 at 1:06pm, so the day after Rey's co-workers located the body. His personal effects had already been removed. What the episode didn't expand on, and what always struck me, was the presence of the window screen near the hole.
The windows in most of the Belvedere units are enormous. The condos have 10-12 foot ceilings. Most people I knew in the building didn't bother with screens because of the size & due to the fact that bugs just weren't much of an issue in Mt. Vernon at that height.
The screen on the roof looks smaller, barely larger than the hole itself. The windows at the ledge level are smaller - I had the impression at the time that it might have come from that level (again, not knowing the details of the story then).
The ledge itself wouldn't be an ideal place to be, ever. But it would be possible to move to the corner of the building nearest the hole if you had access. Here's a view from beneath the ledge (again from the 8th floor). I was getting a shot of the ornate lion heads.
Another item the episode sort of glosses over is the difficulty in gaining access to the roof of the building. There was a bar at the top called the 13th Floor. If you knew any of the staff up there, you could get onto the roof easily.
