A mother died when she fell down the stairs of a New York City subway station while carrying her one-year-old baby in a stroller.

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Malaysia Goodson, 22, was found unresponsive on the platform at the 7th Ave station in Manhattan around 8pm on Monday, New York police said. The resident of Stamford, Connecticut, was taken to Mt Sinai West hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Her daughter was not seriously hurt. She was found conscious and treated at the station, according to the NYPD.

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The tragedy was a nightmare scenario for many parents in New York, who are forced to carry strollers up and down subway stairs or rely on strangers for help.

Only about a quarter of the city’s 472 stations have elevators, making the rest inaccessible to people in wheelchairs and difficult to navigate for parents and older people.

In a statement, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman, Shams Tarek, said: “This is an absolutely heartbreaking incident. While the ultimate cause of the event is being investigated by the MTA, medical examiner and the NYPD, we know how important it is to improve accessibility in our system.”



The city comptroller, Scott Stringer, said: “As a parent one of my biggest fears was navigating my kids’ double stroller through our broken subway system. And it isn’t uncommon because only 24% of stations have elevators. It’s completely unacceptable. My heart goes out to [Goodson’s] family.”

An audit by Stringer’s office found that 80% of subway elevators and escalators did not get proper maintenance.

Disability advocates have sued the Metropolitan Transit Authority, charging that they have violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to install elevators and failed to maintain the ones that exist, leading to about 25 elevator outages a day.

Goodson had come into the city to go shopping, her brother Dieshe Goodson told News 12 Connecticut.

“She had a lot of bags and the baby in the stroller,” he said. “When I was on my way to the hospital last night, I was praying that it wasn’t her the whole time. Please don’t be my sister.”

The New York medical examiner was investigating to determine the cause of death, which happened at the station on the B, D and E lines.

“This is a heartbreaking tragedy that never should have happened,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter. “The subway system is not accessible for everyone and that’s an environment the MTA should not allow.”

The president of New York City Transit, Andy Byford, a Briton, has pledged to improve accessibility as part of an ambitious plan to overhaul the ageing and delay-plagued subway system, aiming to create at least 50 accessible stations over five years, so that no rider is more than two stops away from one.

But the system is in dire financial straits and the Fast Forward plan has not been funded. The New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, has drawn criticism for a plan to renovate three dozen stations without adding elevators.