Summary: Attorney Kenneth Freeling took his own life this week.
On Thursday, a Manhattan lawyer committed suicide by jumping off a luxury high-rise. His body landed in front of stunned witnesses, according to The New York Post, and the victim was pronounced dead at the scene.
Kenneth Freeling lived on the ninth floor of the Park Avenue building where he leapt. He flung himself off the roof in the morning and landed on the second-floor terrace. The New York Post spoke to a building resident who said she and her daughter were at the second-floor gym when they saw a man’s body hit the ground. The resident was the one who called 9-1-1.
“We were on the treadmills facing this when a man fell out of the sky and landed on the terrace,” the unnamed woman said. “I was looking at the TV and my daughter said, ‘Mom, a man just fell out of the sky.’ It was not pretty. She shook him and said, ‘Are you OK?’”
Freeling worked for Covington and Burling and was a former partner of Dewey & LeBoeuf. Police said that he had a history of mental illness and drug use.
According to Covington and Burling, Freeling was a litigator who managed “a broad range of cases, from antitrust and patent matters to complex commercial cases involving financial institutions, telecoms, media, pharmaceutical, industrial, construction and other major industries in federal, state, and international courts, as well as in international arbitration tribunals.” He graduated from Georgetown University Law School.