Elevator

Two pickpockets working the deep-pockets crowd in town for Saturday night's Tyson-Stewart heavyweight fight sure picked the wrong pockets to pick. The victims were cops, who collared the suspects. Walter Finley, 58, a retired New York City detective, was walking out of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino with a $1,429 slot-machine jackpot. As people squeezed into a parking-garage elevator, one woman began yelling, "Too close! Too close!" as though she were claustrophobic, Finley recalled yesterday.

AFSCME Local 18 leader Wendell Wattes, speaking at a rally outside Probation Department offices on North Broad Street yesterday, urges city officials to provide more protection for employees after a probation officer was stabbed inside an elevator Tuesday. The officer, Kelly O'Neill, was released from the hospital yesterday after being treated for a chest wound.

On a mission are (from left) Lakeysha Clary, Saita Menokem-El, the Camden Litter Critter mascot and Eric Seddens. They had just boarded the elevator yesterday in the Camden Courthouse and were encouraging workers to recycle for "Clean Your Files Day. "

Vanderbilt University football player Luke Hammond was in critical condition yesterday after falling 100 feet down a dormitory elevator shaft. Hammond, 19, a freshman linebacker from Montgomery, Ala., fell Monday night trying to climb out of a crowded elevator stopped between the ninth and 10th floors. He suffered internal injuries, and doctors operated on him yesterday morning, removing his spleen, university spokeswoman Elizabeth Latt said. Thirteen people were aboard the elevator when it stopped in Carmichael Towers West, said Steve Caldwell, dean of residential and judicial affairs.

Police are hunting for two thugs who robbed and injured a 93-year-old woman in her Center City apartment building Monday. The woman's wrist was fractured in the scuffle, and the thugs escaped with just $6 - even though the victim had additional money stashed in a secret pocket in her purse. "These two are cowards," said police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore. "Anybody who's going to prey on a 93-year-old woman who's defenseless, for $6, needs to be found. " Vanore said security cameras captured the two men apparently stalking the victim as she entered her high-rise at 15th and Locust streets about 10 a.m. Monday.

For seven months, Michael Brown was the lone pupil in a makeshift classroom, isolated from his classmates because his school had no elevator to move him from floor to floor. For Michael, whose hands and legs are weakened by muscular dystrophy, going to school meant going to the library at John F. Kennedy Junior High School in Willingboro. Most of his lessons were taught by a tutor. "I was not too popular with all the kids," said the 13-year-old, a small- framed boy with a ready laugh, "because I didn't know all the kids I should've known, because I wasn't in the classes.

Nicodemo Scarfo Jr. (center), accompanied by two unidentified men, enters City Hall this morning for a hearing on charges that he beat a woman in a Hahnemann Hospital elevator on Nov. 4. The hearing was postponed until Jan. 24 because Scarfo's attorney is in federal court defending Scarfo's father, who is on trial on racketeering charges. Young Scarfo remains free on $100,000 bail.

Police evacuated three buildings at Temple University for nearly four hours yesterday afternoon after five packages that looked like they could have been explosive devices were found in several classrooms and an elevator in the Engineering Building on North 12th Street. The packages were x-rayed by the FBI and found to be harmless, said Special Agent Linda Vizi.

A Philadelphia woman was killed early Sunday when she took an elevator to her 12th floor apartment and was overcome when the doors opened on a raging blaze. Shantel McCoy, 32, lived in a high-rise building on the northside of Chicago where she had moved after losing her job at a Center City accounting firm, reported the Chicago Tribune . McCoy was returning to her apartment after picking up some takeout food, the Tribune reported. She boarded the elevator, hit the button for her floor, and sped up the 21-story building.

They're tucked away in office cubicles seven, eight and nine floors above street level. Nevertheless, the office workers at a building on Broad Street near South are sitting ducks for holiday thieves, who creep inside from the street looking for laptop computers, office equipment and credit cards. The Armani-clad crooks are slick and professional. They arrive in the lobby wearing fine suits and blend into the crowd. Before long, they've signed in and taken an elevator upstairs to a law firm, advertising agency or medical office, where they wander unchecked and pilfer goods from beneath workers' desks.