In a daring white-knuckle rescue, police plucked a suicidal woman who planned to leap from the 10th story of her Upper West Side building wrapped in a sleeping bag because she “didn’t want to make a mess.”

Officer Nina Friberg, 35, was among the first rescuers at the scene. She engaged the desperate woman in conversation about flowers in Central Park for 10 minutes until Emergency Services Unit officers arrived.

That conversation “felt like forever,” Friberg said Saturday.

“My adrenaline was going. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I was trying to talk to her and say ‘what are you doing. Please come inside and talk to me.’ All I could see were her hands.”
Friberg’s NYPD crisis intervention training kicked in and her mission was keep the woman talking until ESU arrived.

“I wanted her to focus on me and not look down,” Friberg told the Post.

The dramatic episode unfolded Thursday around 6 p.m. when cops got a call of a woman in her 20s on the ledge outside of the building at West End Avenue near West 95th Street.

Friberg, who has been with the NYPD since 2003, was first on the scene with her partner and spotted the woman’s hands gripping the window sill. She was zipped up inside of a sleeping bag and had a hood over her head and was standing on a 3-inch wide ledge below, dangling from the window. The woman, who was heavily sedated, had climbed out of the window through a stairwell in the building.

Friberg said the woman “seemed out of it” and she would often let go of the window sill with one hand.

While she was outside of the building, the woman told Friberg she wanted flowers from Central Park so Friberg used that to keep her talking.

“I said, ‘tell me about the flowers, describe them. What do they look like.’ She was responding saying she wants the flowers but didn’t know where they were.’”

“I said, ‘please come inside. Maybe we can get you some flowers if you come inside.’”

Detective Randy Miller, 44, of the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit, was just blocks away when he was called to the building.

“When we parked the car, we could see her on the ledge from the street.”

“As we were talking to her you could tell she was under the influence of some type of sedative. She kept nodding off and falling asleep.”

Miller said his crew of ESU officers took positions in the surrounding windows. In the meantime the distraught woman’s mom came to the stairwell from where her daughter was hanging.

The distraught woman kept saying: “I don’t want to make a mess in front of my mom. I feel like I’m such a disappointment,” Miller recounted.

Miller said that in order to reach the woman he had to lie on his stomach on the landing of the stairwell in order to see her.

“I’m laying on the landing on my stomach. I was trying to keep eye contact with her.”

“She almost started to fall asleep. Her eyes started to roll back.”

“She let go with one hand and I knew we had to interject.”

“When her knuckles started to turn white, I knew she was about to let go.”

Miller said he grabbed her hand. Other ESU officers pulled her to safety through a window one story below.

After she was rescued, the woman resisted the officers, and tried to headbutt one.

But the cops were grateful they were able to save her life. The distraught woman was taken to St. Lukes Hospital.

Miller has dealt with dozens of similar situations. “This was one of the most difficult ones I have ever done,” citing the logistics of how the woman was positioned. “There was no way for us to get next to her. There were no adjoining windows.”

He said it was a team effort.

“If Nina had not kept her talking we would not have been able to grab her,” he said in praise of Officer Friberg’s actions. “It was a coordinated effort.”

Additional reporting by Shawn Cohen