Posted on: Monday, November 22, 2004
Neighbors will miss little boy's 'bright smile'
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
A makeshift shrine of breakfast and flowers was placed yesterday near a pillar in the parking structure of a Mo'ili'ili condo high-rise, its sad, typed and handwritten notes addressed to a little boy named "Eddy."
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser The boy was 3 years old, the medical examiner said.
Police said Edward was at home with his father just before the fall.
The father told detectives he had stepped outside the door of his apartment at Hono Hale Towers for a moment while Eddy was inside.
When he stepped back in, the boy was gone. He had fallen to the parking lot below.
Friends and relatives passed in and out of the apartment building yesterday, paying their respects to the family.
Rebecca Breyer • The Honolulu Advertiser The shrine in the parking lot at the back of the building included a styrofoam plate of scrambled eggs, Portuguese sausage, rice and hash browns. A cup of water stood beside it.
"Our thoughts and prayers go out to you and your family," read a note addressed to Eddy and taped to a pillar above the breakfast. " ... we've all suffered a great loss. Your bright smile to us in the elevator or the pool area will be thoroughly missed."
It was signed: "One of your Eighth Floor Neighbors."
The sixth-floor neighbors left an arrangement of tropical flowers. Other neighbors tucked notes to the little boy into bouquets and potted plants. All the notes spoke of how much the boy would be missed.
Bonnie Matsumoto, a nurse who lives on the second floor of Reiser's building, said she was standing outside the building's entrance Saturday night when she heard the thud of something falling in the back.
Shortly afterward, she said, Eddy's father came running down the stairs, looking frantic and shouting that his son had fallen.
The nurse and the father performed CPR on the boy until Emergency Medical Services paramedics arrived.
Eddy was taken by ambulance to The Queen's Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The boy's mother returned home, distraught, shortly after he was taken away.
The Reisers' neighbors described the family as close-knit, and commented in particular about the father's close relationship with his son.
They said Saturday night that they often saw the boy out with his father, going for walks or swimming in the pool.
"That boy is his life," Matsumoto said Saturday.
It was not quite four months ago that Exodus Berger, 2, died after climbing onto a metal storage rack and falling from a 14th-floor balcony at his mother's apartment on University Avenue.
His Aug. 8 death was the first caused by a fall from a high-rise involving a child age 4 or younger since March 1999, according to the state Department of Health's Injury Prevention Program.
After Exodus Berger's death authorities at the Injury Prevention Program warned of the importance of keeping lanai safe and items that children can climb, such as chairs, away from the rail.
Reach Karen Blakeman at 535-2430 or kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.
Eddy, whose full name, according to the medical examiner's office, was Edward Reiser, died Saturday after falling from the lanai of his parents' eighth-story apartment at 2648 Kuilei St.
Many friends and neighbors yesterday left flowers, notes and other remembrances at a makeshift shrine in the parking lot of the Mo'ili'ili apartment building where 3-year-old Edward Reiser fell to his death.
"He's taking it pretty hard," said a man who left the building yesterday, holding tightly to the hands of a boy and a girl.
Edward Reiser, known to those who loved him as Eddy, fell Saturday from his parent's eighth floor apartment in Mo'ili'ili.
