With summer winding down, Eric G. John, the United States ambassador to Thailand, made a trip familiar to many parents: he accompanied his 17-year-old daughter to New York as she got ready for her first year of college.
But his daughter, Nicole, barely experienced being a freshman at Parsons The New School For Design, near Union Square.
She died early Friday after falling 22 floors from a high-rise apartment building in Herald Square after a night out that led her and friends to a party at the high-rise. Her body was discovered at 4:14 a.m., sprawled on a third-floor landing of Herald Towers, at 50 West 34th Street, near Avenue of the Americas, where she was pronounced dead, the police said.
“Her father had just brought her over from Bangkok and moved her into her dorm,” her aunt, Betsy John Jennings, said in a phone interview from her home in Lakeside Park, Ky. “I just spoke to her Monday evening, and she was just so pleased and happy with her roommates and to be in the school.”
Fighting tears, Ms. Jennings added, “She is very artistic, a beautiful young woman.”
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the fall appeared to have been an accident. The police said Ms. John was apparently out with friends at Tenjune, a club in the meatpacking district, but left at 2:15 a.m. to go to a party on the 25th floor of Herald Towers.
It was unclear what caused Ms. John to fall. A witness who was at the party told the police that Ms. John took off her shoes before climbing onto a window ledge. When officers discovered her body, Mr. Kelly said, they found a small camera nearby, leading investigators to believe she might have stepped out to take a picture. Being unfamiliar with the apartment, she might also have believed there was a terrace outside the window.
On Friday, the police arrested Ilan Nassimi, 25, who lived in the apartment from which Ms. John fell, on charges of unlawfully dealing with a child because there was alcohol present in the apartment, according to officials. But the police said they had not determined if Ms. John had been drinking. An autopsy is scheduled for Saturday, an official said.
Officers who arrived at Herald Towers in response to a 911 call noted the apartment appeared to have been cleaned up.
“There was no alcohol, or no indication of a party going on,” Mr. Kelly said. A witness in an adjacent building, “who saw the young woman fall,” Mr. Kelly said, called 911. Ms. John had a false identification, a Brazilian driver’s license with someone else’s name, showing her to be 23 or 24, Mr. Kelly said.
The teenager’s death reverberated far from New York. Ms. Jennings said Ms. John’s mother, Sophia, was still in Thailand. Mr. John, she said, was in Virginia, helping his son, Adam, 20, prepare for his second year at James Madison University.
As a longtime State Department official, Mr. John has had several tours abroad, in South Korea, Tanzania and Vietnam, said his brother, Robert John, a lawyer in Evanston, Ill. He became the ambassador to Thailand in 2007.
Ms. John “has lived all over the world,” Robert John said.
“I think she spoke three or four languages fluently,” he went on.
In October 2008, Ms. John appeared on the cover of a society magazine in Thailand called Ploy Kaem Petch (which translates to “gems mixed with diamonds”). She attended high school in Fairfax, Va., and at the International School of Bangkok. Her cosmopolitan tastes, in fashion and the arts were apparent on Tumblr, a Web site where she posted photos and quotations from people as varied as Mark Twain and Lil Wayne. It was also a chronicle of sorts, where she kept readers updated on her life and answered questions.
In August, she posted 376 entries.
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