An 84-year-old man was critically injured when he got trapped between floors in an elevator in his Harlem apartment building, officials say.

"All I could see was his legs dangling from the back elevator," said witness Elijah Williams, who said he heard the man's screams when he became pinned between the first and second floors.

The elevator at the New York City Housing Authority-run building on 105th Street started going up before the doors fully closed, according to another neighbor.

"Half his body got caught inside the elevator. His legs were jiggling out," Williams said.

Firefighters worked to remove the man from the elevator, and he was taken to Harlem Hospital in critical condition with a possible leg fracture.

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Residents said the building's elevators have a history of problems, and the elevator in which the man was injured Monday was having problems before the incident.

The building is home to many elderly and disabled residents like Williams, who is in a wheelchair.

"My mother is 80 years old. We are both stuck in the house," he said. "We can't leave because we're scared we can't get back upstairs."

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NYCHA would not confirm whether it had any complaints on record. A spokesperson would say only that the incident was being investigated.

In the meantime, residents crammed into the one working elevator Monday afternoon as a repairman worked on the other. But that's merely a quick fix, according to residents, who are asking for new elevators.

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A car fell down a New York City garage elevator shaft Tuesday morning, injuring two people, the fire department said.

FDNY via Twitter

A car plunged down a garage elevator shaft in Manhattan's Upper East Side on Tuesday.

The victims were taken to the hospital and are in stable condition.

A parking attendant was driving into the elevator on the fifth floor of the garage around 9:45 a.m., but when he pulled in, the elevator car wasn't there, NBCNewYork.com reported. As the car plunged down, it injured a worker on a lower floor.

 Firefighters had to extricate the driver from the vehicle. An FDNY spokesman told msnbc.com both he and the other garage employee were taken to Cornell Medical Center in stable condition.

The garage, which also serves as a Hertz rental location, is on East 76th Street near First Avenue in Manhattan.

A dentist who works near the garage told NBCNewYork.com he doesn't recall there being any major issues with the six-story garage, other than the elevator temporarily being out of order last winter during a power outage in the building.

The FDNY tweeted several pictures from the scene, including one of firefighters using pulleys to drag the car down from the shaft back down to street level.

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Investigators say an important elevator safety mechanism was apparently turned off when an advertising executive was crushed to death at a Manhattan office building.

A mechanic overrode the mechanism, a safety circuit that normally prevents elevators from moving with their doors open, to enable work on the midtown Manhattan elevator about a half-hour before an elevator did just that and killed Suzanne Hart on Dec. 14, the city Department of Investigation and Department of Buildings found.

The mechanic insisted he'd put the safety system back online by the time Hart tried to step into the car, but they concluded the mechanism "was apparently bypassed at the time of the fatal incident, thereby allowing the car to move with its doors open," the investigation agency said.

Read NBCNewYork.com's complete coverage on elevator tragedy

The Buildings Department, meanwhile, suspended the elevator repair company owner's license. He failed to notify the agency and get an OK to put the car back in service after the repairs that day, among other missteps.

"The investigation starkly showed elevator safety protocols were ignored," Department of Investigation Commissioner Rose Gill Hearn said in a statement.

The Manhattan District Attorney has received the report and is reviewing it, a spokeswoman said.

A lawyer for the owner of the elevator repair company, Transel Elevator Inc., was in an unrelated trial and didn't immediately respond to a text message and email Monday. A lawyer for the mechanic didn't immediately return telephone and email messages.

Hart, 41, was heading to her office at the advertising agency Y&R, formerly known as Young & Rubicam, when she tried to get into one of several elevators in the lobby of the 27-story tower built in 1926. Two other people were already in the elevator, called car 9 in the report.

As they looked on in horror, it started rising with the doors still open, dragging Hart between the car and the wall. It got stuck between the first and second floors.

"These workers and their supervisors failed to follow the most basic safety procedures, and their carelessness cost a woman her life," Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri said in a statement. Besides putting the elevator back into service without proper clearance, workers didn't follow simple precautions such as strapping caution tape across the elevator door, the agency said.

"If these safety measures were in place, this tragedy would have been prevented," LiMandri added. His agency already has cited Transel with 23 violations carrying a minimum penalty of $117,000.

The Department of Investigation said "the investigation found that the only condition in which elevator number 9 could have moved during the incident is if the elevator was on 'automatic' and the safety circuit was fully closed (bypassed )."

Mechanic Michael Hill initially told investigators he had no idea why the elevator might have moved with the doors open. Weeks later, he told them under oath that he had temporarily hooked up a wire on the elevator control panel to bypass the safety circuit earlier that morning, the report said.

The procedure, known as jumping, is often done during repairs so that workers can position a car between floors, open the doors to the elevator shaft, and step onto the top of the car to work.

Hill was adamant that he had not accidentally left the jumping wire connected to the control panel once the elevator was in position, DOI said. He said the wire had never left his hand, and he later gave investigators the wire he said he had used.

That wire didn't look as though it had been used for jumping the safety circuit, however — and in the interim, some wire "consistent with" wires used for jumping was found under the metal-grate floor by the control panel, the report said.

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NBCNewYork.com

A woman was crushed and killed by an elevator that began rising as she was stepping onto it while heading to her office in Midtown Wednesday morning.

Two other people were injured in the horrific accident at 285 Madison Ave., which is near East 40th Street.

The woman was identified as Suzanne Hart, 41, an employee with advertising agency Y&R, which is a major tenant in the 1920s building.

Read the full story on NBCNewYork.com

Her grieving boyfriend told NBC New York outside their Brooklyn home: "I loved her. She was a beautiful person."

Officials said Hart was halfway onto the elevator when it took off, without its doors closing. She died after she was crushed between the elevator and the shaft wall.

The other two people were already on the elevator. They did not have physical injuries but were treated for trauma, officials said.

Office workers in the building described a chaotic and gory scene.

"People were running and screaming, 'Someone got crushed in the elevator,'" said John Hanna.

Officials from the Buildings Department and FDNY were investigating.

Y&R said it was "deeply, deeply saddened."

"Our focus at this moment is the well-being of the employee's family, and our larger Young and Rubicam family. As you can imagine, this is a great emotional shock to all of us."

The building is 25 stories tall and was built in the 1920s.

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