A woman from Jackson Heights, collapsed while out partying inside an illegal Queens after-hours club, orders decided to drag her into a backroom instead of calling 911.
According to the woman’s family, after being left in the backroom for hours and no one checking on her, the woman sadly passed away.
Stephanie Quinones was celebrating her 35th birthday at the unnamed nightspot on 49th Street in Astoria on July 31 when she suddenly passed out.
Shocking footage retrieved by investigators, show bystanders slapping Quinones in the face, to apparently revive her. However, Quinones didn’t come to and the workers then proceeded to drag her by her arms across the dance floor.
The bartender at the club, which does not have a liquor license, sent a picture of an unconscious Quinones to her mom in Florida. Then the bartender began texting Quinones’ sister, Jasmine Gonzalez, who lives in the Bronx.
“Come get your drunk sister,” Gonzalez said she was told.
Gonzalez said, “I didn’t realize how dire the situation was and ended up getting there about two hours later. I then called 911 when I saw her like that. Club employees fled and locked me inside. That’s when I found my sister laying lifeless and realized she was dead.”
“I was doing compressions on a dead person,” Gonzalez said. “Everyone left me alone. No one even had the decency to stay.”
“I stepped outside to wave the ambulance over, then went back inside to my sister. Then I noticed by the time the first responders made it down the block, workers had locked the club’s door,” Gonzalez continued to recount. “They all left because they did not want to be the one there when the cops got called.”
Quinones was taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital after paramedics arrived. The NYPD said they were investigating a person declared dead on arrival at the location of the club on that night, although they did not identify Quinones by name.
“Someone would still have their mother if they just called 911,” said Gonzalez. “The thing that hurts me the most is, not only did they not call 911, but it was cruel to have me go over there, giving me hopes that she was alive.”
Adding to their grief, Quinones’ family and friends said they later found video on social media showing her lifeless on the dance floor.
“These Instagrammers are circulating all this sh-t,” family friend and activist Talea Wufka said. “They’re all taking video, so they do everything but call 911.”
Gonzalez said she believes her sister was already dead when the video was taken.
“She didn’t have any reaction at all in the video,” she said. “Usually people have a reaction.”
Meanwhile, residents and local businesses said they have been terrorized by the club, which is open throughout the night and into the early morning.
“If it’s an illegal establishment, this is the end result,” Wufka said. “They didn’t want police, they didn’t want an ambulance, because they didn’t want their illegal activities to be exposed.”
A nearby business owner who spoke anonymously for fear of retribution said the club initially said they were an insurance company when they moved in during the pandemic and then began throwing late-night booze-fests.
Quinones’ family has since started a GoFundMe campaign that has so far raised nearly $25,000.
The medical examiner said it is investigating and still working to determine the cause of Quinones’ death.
