Queens: Greek man jumps to death during apartment visit

A JOBLESS Greek man despondent over his ill mother’s costly medical bills posed as an apartment hunter to get inside a luxury high-rise – just so he could leap to his death from a 25th-floor balcony.
Anastasi Calatzis, 38, sent a grim text message to his brother Saturday and then jumped from the balcony – with its stunning views of the Manhattan skyline – at the Avalon Riverview North in Long Island City in the borough of Queens.
“I see this guy go out on the terrace, look around holding on to the banister, and then he puts one foot over and I thought, ‘Oh no! What’s he going to do?’ said Patricia Byrne, a resident who lives across the street at eye level to the apartment.
“He bends his knee, and down he went, just like that. It was just so quick. He looked very calm for some reason.”
Calatzis had looked at the unit two days earlier in an initial visit.
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“He posed as a prospective tenant,” said Rick Rosa, a local real-estate agent who knows the broker. “He sounded very cheerful, like he was going to take the apartment.”
But his real motive became soon clear. The out-of-work Lexus salesman – facing foreclosure on his Queens home – told the agent he needed to make a phone call and stepped out onto the terrace, which boasts sparkling views of the East River and the Manhattan skyline.

There he sent a text message to his younger brother, George.
“He said, ‘Please take care of my mother. I can’t take it anymore,'” said his grieving cousin, Marianne Costantinou, 52. “He left all the account numbers, all the keys and apologized in the text for all the pain he was going to cause.”
Then, without another word, the “mama’s boy” — as she fondly called him — scrambled over the side as the broker had his back turned.
“I kept thinking what his last view was. I wonder if he looked at the Empire State Building,” Costantinou said. “All he did was step forward and drop.”