Mom jumps to her death, leaps off ledge as rescuers approach

Melanie Stokes, who loved flowers, walking on the lakefront and her new baby, jumped to her death from a 12th-story window ledge Monday while in the grip of postpartum psychosis.

Her death came after a weekend of numerous newspaper and television reports seeking her whereabouts and desperate searching of her favorite haunts by her husband, her parents and other family members.

Shortly after 6 a.m. Monday police and firefighters were called to the Days Inn hotel at 1816 N. Clark with reports of someone on an upper-story ledge. They entered the room, talked to her and thought she had indicated a willingness to accept help.

One firefighter was trying to reach a hand to her over the lowered top of a double-hung window when she plunged feet first to a sidewalk below.

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times

“I prayed to God, please, make her change her mind,” said Al Castano, 62, a maintenance worker at a nearby apartment building who saw Stokes in a white shirt, dark trousers and sneakers sitting on the ledge with her feet dangling.

About 10 minutes after he arrived he saw her jump.

“I screamed, ‘No!’ “ Castano said. “I almost cried myself.”

First Battalion Fire Chief Ken Wojtecki said rescuers arrived on the scene three minutes after they were called. He said some firefighters were preparing to lower themselves from the roof one floor above and others were trying to talk to Stokes.

Stokes had lowered the top half of a double-hung window and climbed out to the ledge, Wojtecki said. When it appeared she might be receptive to help, a firefighter stood on a chair in the room and reached over the top of the window. Then she jumped.

The Fire Department no longer uses rescue nets, and at a height of 12 stories, “it is highly unlikely that it would have made any difference,” spokeswoman Molly Sullivan said.

Stokes’ mother, Carol Blocker, said she had known since Thursday morning her daughter was going to kill herself “because she told me goodbye” in a phone call before stepping into a taxi outside her Bronzeville home and disappearing.

“We should have committed her until everything kicked in,” her mother said, referring to medicines that take four to six weeks to start controlling depression and psychosis.

Where Stokes was from Thursday until Sunday was still unknown. At 5 a.m. Sunday she checked into the Days Inn using an assumed name, and spent much of the day in the hotel lobby and hospitality room.

She struck up a conversation with a woman whom she had overheard was a doctor from Upstate New York and asked her about carbon monoxide poisoning.

“Her story was she had come to visit a friend . . . who was carbon monoxide poisoned,” said the woman, who asked that she not be identified. “There was nothing about how she was acting or talking” that seemed strange, she said.

Stokes, 41, grew up in Chicago, attending Harvard-St. George private school in Hyde Park, Immaculata High School and then Spelman College in Atlanta. She seemed afraid of the corporate world, her mother said, and worked as a waitress in Hyde Park and at the front desk at the downtown Hyatt before joining the Astra Zeneca pharmaceutical company. There, she rose rapidly to manager of sales, a job she held until she left during her pregnancy.

She married Dr. Sam Stokes, a surgeon at Cook County Hospital, 3 1/2 years ago and was thrilled when she finally became pregnant, her mother said. Their daughter, Sommer Skyy, was born Feb. 23.

Provided

The first sign of trouble was that Melanie Stokes showed no interest as she cared for the baby. Her aunts came to help. Then she called her mother and said, “Mommy, something has happened to me. I felt something snap in my brain.”

She was in and out of hospitals three times, each for a week to 10 days. She stopped eating and drinking and wouldn’t swallow pills. Her weight dropped rapidly.

When she came home from one hospital, she went to a neighbor’s house and asked if he had a loaded gun. When she visited her aunts, all of whom live in high-rise buildings, she would rush to the windows and take out the screens, her mother said.

Blocker’s sisters, Vera Wood-Anderson, Grace Alexander and Joyce Oates, began staying with Stokes all day to watch her.

Last Thursday, Stokes was eating breakfast and smiling when her husband left for a meeting at work. Then she made her goodbye call to her mother, saying Blocker had been a good mother and to take care of the baby.