EAST VILLAGE — The NYPD is hunting for the drug dealer who provided psychedelic mushrooms to the NYU freshman who plunged 15 stories to his death from an East Village dorm on Monday morning, DNAinfo New York has learned.
“We owe it to his family,” a law enforcement official said of the attempt to identify the source of the hallucinogenics police say Titan Lee-Hai, 18, took before he plummeted naked from the roof of Third North Residence Hall about 3:20 a.m. Monday.
The teen's roommate told detectives they had eaten 'shrooms before Lee-Hai, an aspiring rapper with the stage name Trizzy Kid, pulled a fire alarm and pushed through a locked door to the roof, police said.
In addition to locating the dealer, the police would like to find the batch of mushrooms the teen took to sample their potency and determine if they were altered or tainted to make them more dangerous or powerful, sources said.
The range of criminal offenses for the dealer could hinge on those findings, from simple charges of selling narcotics to more serious charges if the drugs were tainted.
“By all accounts, [Lee-Hai] was a normal, nice kid and that this was completely out of character for him and clearly the apparent result of the drug,” sources added.
Shazi Khurshid, a fellow freshman, ran into Lee-Hai moments before he plunged to his death, according to published reports.
"I was in the elevator, and he just walked in and punched me in the face. He was naked when he walked in," Khurshid, 19, told the New York Post. "So, it was pretty obvious he was not in his senses."
Lee-Hai then went up to the rooftop, which can only be accessed by an emergency exit door that trips an automatic fire alarm, sources said.
The liberal studies major and Trinidad native, who did not leave any note in his room before leaping from the roof, was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to police and his social media profile.
Psychedelic mushrooms can cause terrifying hallucinations and a bad trip can include “anxiety, confused or disordered thinking, and panic,” according to Brown University.
Lee-Hai's death marks the second time in recent months that an NYU student was intoxicated and fell from a dorm building.
In November, 19-year-old Asher Vongtau survived 36 hours wedged in a narrow space between an NYU dorm at 80 Lafayette St. and an adjacent building.
The liberal studies student suffered internal bruising and fractured his skull, pelvis and arm, according to a report.
Vongtau later told investigators that he had been drinking through the night before tumbling between the buildings.
