An artist fascinated with the morbid hanged herself from the fire escape of her Brooklyn apartment building Sunday — horrifying residents who were left to walk past her dangling body for more than an hour.
The body of Jennifer Lubanko, 21, was discovered hanging outside her fourth-floor apartment at Utica Avenue and Prospect Place in Crown Heights around 8:20 a.m., law enforcement sources said.
She had tied a cord on the slotted walkway and then leaped off, snapping her neck and leaving her corpse to hang in front of the third-floor window, witnesses said.
“It was like a horror movie,’’ said Horace Benoit, 38, a neighbor who lives in the building. “Poor girl. Her body was out there so long, just hanging.”
Lubanko’s body remained in the alleyway between two buildings for more than an hour before police officers finally covered it with a white sheet. It remained behind the sheet for at least 40 more minutes, witnesses said.
Police said they didn’t want to move the body until homicide was ruled out.
“This is something you don’t want to wake up to on a Sunday morning,” said local resident Violet Acuna, 42. “I thought [her body] was fake, like a Halloween prank, and then I could see it was a [woman] hanging. I just screamed.”
Police sources said they did not find a suicide note inside Lubanko’s apartment, which she shared with another woman in her 20s, and said it is unclear why she killed herself.
But the woman’s artwork was dark and appeared troubled.
Lubanko regularly posted disturbing videos and drawings on a personal site. She also posted her work on ScaryPretty.org, which describes itself as “glitteringly morbid,” according to a parent of one of her friends.
One of her pieces is titled “The Toilet Book,” a series of hand-drawn images and text that likens humanity to a bleak cesspool. “Hi, I am a human and I live in this toilet bowl of s–t-made things and evil people and all we do is swim in circles all day,” one of the pages reads.
A distraught man who identified himself as the woman’s father showed up with a suitcase to clear out his daughter’s belongings, but declined to answer questions.
“She was very social. Her parents were always around visiting,” said neighbor Stella Wiley, 66, who added that Lubanko looked to be in good spirits as she walked her pet dachshund about 90 minutes before taking her life.
“She seemed like a nice girl.”