Teen At Prom Killed By Falling Pipe -- `She Was Waiting For The Balloons,' Says Her Mom

NEW YORK - Micha Chatmon left for her prom wearing a peach gown and a $23 pink corsage. She'll be in a cap and gown at her wake.

The high-school senior from New York City was killed at her prom yesterday when a piece of piping plummeted 91 feet, striking her in the head as classmates looked up to watch the dropping of balloons.

"What I feel is that God wanted her and he picked her at a time when she never knew what happened," Micha's distraught mother, Dorothy, said in their home in Queens. "She was waiting for the balloons."

Authorities were at a loss to explain how the 5-inch pipe coupling toppled from a grated-metal work area some 8 feet from the ceiling of the Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The black, white and yellow balloons, suspended in a net, never fell. Friends and relatives were horrified at the popular 17-year-old's apparently random fate.

"She came in a limousine and left in an ambulance," said Byron Morrison, 17, a friend from her high school, Springfield Gardens, who was looking forward to his own senior prom next year. "I don't think this school will ever be the same."

The accident occurred about 12:30 a.m. yesterday, when the balloons were supposed to drop in a dramatic ending of the prom in the Hall of Science's Great Hall.

Charisse Howard, a 19-year-old senior, said she had an arm around Micha as they looked upward at the balloons but never saw the piping that struck her friend.

"Someone got up and said, `This is the moment we've all been waiting for!' " Howard recalled at the school. "And then I looked over at Micha and she was lying on the floor. I kept yelling, `Micha! Micha!' "

Teens screamed and rushed to her side, breaking into tears and hugging each other for comfort. The dying girl was rushed to Elmhurst Hospital Center, where doctors opened her chest to try to revive her and then placed her on a respirator, Dorothy Chatmon said.

"She wasn't breathing when she came in, and they did everything they could do, but she never came out of it," Chatmon said of her daughter. "As a nurse I see it every day, but never when it's me."

Police and parks officials sealed off the Great Hall yesterday as about 40 police and buildings department investigators tried to figure out how the prom could have gone so horribly wrong. Homicide detectives were assisting in the investigation of what was considered to be an accident.

Officials described the piping as threaded, metal cylinder about 6 inches in diameter and 5 inches long.

Alan Friedman, director of the New York Hall of Science, said the piping did not match any existing structure inside the Great Hall.