Connor Cummings, 20, of Rockaway, NJ, slipped 25 feet, past the ladder he used to access the catwalk before landing hard on the hotel’s roof around 10:40 p.m. on Wednesday, the sources said. Cummings was pronounced dead at the scene. "They say that he went up the elevator, and then went up a stairway, and then went out on a balcony, but the cops aren't saying exactly what happened. “The kid’s traumatized,” said a relative, before declining to comment further. Cummings was a sophomore psychology major at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he also took photography courses and played a leadership role in the fraternity Alpha Sigma Phi.
– Connor Cummins' family describes him to WABC-TV as a photography devotee—and that enthusiasm may have cost him his life. The New Jersey man, said to be either 20 or 24 years old, and an 18-year-old pal ascended the scaffolding outside NYC's Four Seasons hotel Wednesday night in search of the perfect panoramic picture—but Cummins may have slipped on railings made slippery by the rain and fell nine stories to his death, cops tell NJ.com. An NYPD spokesman tells the New York Daily News that the initial investigation suggests the men weren't guests of the hotel. Cummins, who originally hails from Rockaway and whose Facebook page indicates he's now a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, per ABC, landed on one of the hotel's lower-level rooftops around 11:15pm and was pronounced dead at the scene, reports the New York Post. His friend wasn't injured and was questioned by authorities to fill in the blanks; he was released Thursday morning without being charged. "He was a loving boy, that's all I can say," one of Cummins' relatives tells the Post. "I don't know what happened." (There's more suspicion surrounding a Muslim teen's fatal fall off a Seattle building.)