Chicago woman killed by gargoyle falling from landmark Second Presbyterian Church
Sarah Bean was walking to lunch with her boyfriend in Chicago on Thursday when a piece of a gargoyle fell from an old church’s bell tower, several stories above, struck the 34-year-old mother of two in the head and killed her, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Lance Johnson, the father of Bean’s two children, had plans to marry Bean in the next few months; he was walking with her near Second Presbyterian Church, just blocks from her home, when a piece of decorative metal came loose and knocked a piece of stone from a gargoyle on the bell tower, the Tribune reported.
The church has had a history of code violations, Reuters reported.
Authorities said Bean died at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“It’s horrible,” Bean’s sister-in-law Candice Willis told the Sun-Times. “It really just came out of nowhere.”
Crystal Harris was at a bus stop nearby and called 911, she told the Sun-Times. Johnson, Harris said, “was screaming and rolling around on the floor and just hysterical. He was trying to get cars to stop to help, but they kept going. They must have thought he was a crazy person. He stepped into traffic and one of the cars honked at him, and he threw his umbrella into the air.”
Broderick Adams saw the horrific scene from his fifth-floor apartment across the street before running out to help, according to the Tribune. “I saw that crack on her head and thought, ‘She’s definitely dead,’” Adams told the newspaper.
Bean and Johnson had two sons together, ages 9 and 14, the Sun-Times said.
The church, built in the 1870s, failed building inspections between 2007 and 2011, Chicago’s CBS affiliate reported. One of those violations included “failing to maintain exterior walls of a building or structure free from holes, breaks, loose or rotting boards or timbers and any other conditions which might admit rain or dampness to the walls,” according to the Sun-Times.
The city even went to court in 2011 to get code-violation fines levied against the church, but by then it had come into compliance, the Tribune reported.
The church passed its most recent inspections in 2012 and 2013, the Sun-Times reported, and Chicago’s Department of Buildings is currently inspecting the structure.
According to Reuters, the Second Presbyterian Church said in a statement Friday that it was “deeply sorry at the death.”
Reuters added that the church — “one of the city’s oldest and a national historic landmark” — was putting up protective scaffolding Friday.
“It’s going up as we speak,” an office administrator, Denise Conway, told Reuters. She added that the church will remain open.
