By Shayna Jacobs, Rocco Parascandola and Tina Moore New York Daily News
Aerial View of World Trade One
It was a Geroni-no-no.
Authorities are poised to charge four daredevils in a dangerous, predawn skydive from 1 World Trade Center six months ago, a source told the Daily News.
Word of the charges came on the heels of a major security breach at 1 World Trade Center last week when a New Jersey teen crawled through a hole in a fence and managed to reach the roof of the tower, 1,368 feet above street level.
Justin Casquejo, 16, entered the site on March 16, climbed construction scaffolding and caught an elevator to the top. He remained there for two hours before he was caught by Port Authority Police.
His feat came six months after three skydivers leaped off the building about 3 a.m. on Sept. 30, the source said. Another man in the group remained on the ground as a lookout.
Fears of terrorism were sparked when two of the men, clad in black and wearing helmets, were caught on security cameras landing between the Goldman Sachs building and the Conrad Hotel.
The men were carrying parachutes but investigators were unsure at the time whether they jumped from a building or a plane.
It was unclear if the base-jumpers used the same hole as Casquejo to access the site, the source said. They used the stairs to reach the top of the 105-floor tower, which is 1,776 feet tall counting its spire.
In the end, the parachutists were nabbed because they saved video footage of the exploits.
Authorities got search warrants for their homes and discovered GoPro camera footage of the jump, the source said. It was unclear how investigators identified the men.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office plans to charge the four — Andrew Rossig, James Brady, Kyle Hartwell and Marco Markovich — with burglary, the source said. Other charges are possible.
Hartwell kept lookout on the ground and the other three jumped, the source said. They are all expected to surrender to the NYPD’s First Precinct on Thursday.
The district attorney’s office and the Port Authority declined to comment on the case Sunday.
Rossig and Brady were previously arrested in December 2012 for trying to jump from a tower at Co-op City in the Bronx. The duo and two other men were on the roof of a 33-floor building with parachutes when they were caught by cops, the Bronx Times reported.
Rossig also received tickets for disorderly conduct after jumping off an Orange County bridge in 2008, the Times Herald-Record reported.
The fact that security at 1 World Trade Center remained lax nearly six months after the skydivers jumped drew harsh criticism from a lawyer representing one of the men.
“Certainly it should be embarrassing to the city that after six months they’ve been investigating this and yet they’ve made no efforts to fix the hole in the fence to the No. 1 terror target in the world,” Rossig’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, said.
Brady’s attorney, Andrew Mancilla, said skydiving from the tower was “harmless.”
“My client intended no harm,” Mancilla said. “There was no harm caused and he wants nothing more than to put this behind him.”
With Thomas Tracy
