The new year got off to a dark start on the Lower East Side early this morning, when a malfunctioning elevator at 131 Broome Street killed a 25-year-old man shortly after midnight. Stephen Hewett-Brown had come to the building from the Bronx to attend a New Year's Eve party when he got caught in a stalled elevator on the third floor at 11:30 p.m., the New York Daily News reports. He helped Erude Sanchez, 43, escape the elevator just before it plummeted down the shaft, but in trying to escape himself, he got stuck between the elevator and the shaft and suffered a traumatic injury.

“She started going in, but the elevator started going down and he pushed her out,” Manuel Coronado told the News. “He said, ‘Happy New Year,’ and pushed her out.”

Coronado also escaped and said that he tried to help pry Hewett-Brown free from the gap between the elevator and shaft wall.

When police and EMS arrived, they transferred the victim to New York Downtown Hospital, and doctors there pronounced him dead. Police say they are investigating.

The building, a subsidized, below-market-rate rental complex, has four open Buildings Department violations and its owner Grand St. Guild East HDFC, owes $700 in fines for elevator maintenance lapses. Some of the most recent problems that according to city records remain unaddressed were first identified during a 2012 inspection.