Falling Tree Branch Kills Baby in Central Park

A 6-month-old girl is dead and her mother hospitalized after a branch fell 40 feet from a tree and hit them as they posed for pictures at the Central Park Zoo yesterday. Karla DelGallo of New Jersey had Gianna Ricciutti in her arms and "was trying to get away from the branch," another zoo patron tells the New York Daily News. "She tripped and fell and the baby flew out of her arms." They were rushed to the hospital, where the baby was pronounced dead.

"The mother was covered in blood," another witness tells the New York Post. "The baby wasn't moving or crying. It happened in an instant." The leafy branch appeared to have come from a live tree. The death is the second caused by a falling branch in the park in 2010, the News notes, and comes less than a year after a Google engineer was left in a coma when a rotting branch fell on his head.
(More Central Park stories.)