A 24-year-old Westfield roofing contractor was airlifted to a Newark trauma center after falling from a residential roof and landing on the pointed metal edge of a staircase railing, which left him with a gaping, heavily bleeding chest wound near his right armpit. Stavros Makris, a Westfield resident, was inspecting the roof on Wychwood Road to prepare a quote for his newly launched roofing business when the fall occurred on August 29.
Westfield police, fire and rescue personnel, and paramedics responded to a 911 call in the 300 block of Wychwood Road, according to News12 New Jersey. The first officer on scene arrived within 3.5 minutes of dispatch and found Makris conscious and alert despite the deep puncture wound to his chest. Westfield Fire Department personnel treated him at the scene and applied a chest seal to stabilize his breathing before transport, a detail corroborated by Daily Voice, which reported on statements from a fundraiser organizer describing the severity of his injuries.
Per that same account, the fall punctured Makris's lung and caused severe trauma to his chest and ribs, including breaks and dislocations that required emergency surgery. Because residential streets in the area could not accommodate a helicopter landing, crews transferred Makris to nearby Echo Lake Park in Mountainside, where a New Jersey State Police helicopter landed at a designated zone on a baseball field, the local news outlet Patch reported. The aircraft, operated under the state's NorthSTAR air rescue program, then flew him to University Hospital in Newark.
Why Makris Was Flown to Newark Instead of a Closer Hospital
University Hospital's Eric Muñoz Trauma Center is one of only three Level I trauma centers in New Jersey, alongside facilities in New Brunswick and Camden, and it serves as the sole such facility for the entire northern part of the state. Level I centers maintain round-the-clock teams of specialized trauma surgeons and critical care staff equipped for life-threatening, multi-system injuries, which explains why responders bypassed closer community hospitals for the airlift.
The NorthSTAR program that carried Makris is a joint operation of the New Jersey State Police Aviation Unit and University Hospital, flying State Police Sikorsky helicopters funded in part by a $4 surcharge on state vehicle registrations. New Jersey established the statewide medevac system by legislative statute in 1988 to move critically injured patients quickly to the state's highest tier of trauma care.
Investigation and Community Response
The Westfield Police Department's detective bureau investigated the fall, and officials ultimately deemed it accidental following their review. In the aftermath, a longtime friend set up a GoFundMe campaign titled “Help Stavros Recover From Life Threatening Roofing Accident,” seeking $250,000 to cover surgeries, medical bills, rehabilitation, and lost income. Within days, the campaign had raised more than $48,000 from over 600 donors.
The GoFundMe page also details Makris's background, noting he grew up in Chatham before moving to Westfield and previously worked for Haughey Brothers Landscaping and an outdoor lighting company before starting his own roofing venture. As the fundraiser highlights, self-employed contractors generally lack employer-provided paid leave or workers' compensation benefits, leaving someone like Makris financially exposed at the exact moment he was building his own company.
A Regulatory Gray Area and a Dangerous Trade
Because Makris was inspecting the roof to prepare a quote rather than performing active construction work, federal fall-protection rules under OSHA regulation 29 CFR 1926.500(a)(1) would not have applied to his assessment. Once actual roofing work begins, OSHA mandates fall protection at height thresholds of six feet or more, but pre-construction evaluations like the one Makris was conducting fall into a distinct regulatory category.
The incident lands within a trade already marked by outsized risk. Roofing contractors account for roughly 26% of all fatal falls, slips, and trips in the construction industry, according to data from the National Roofing Contractors Association, and roofers face the fifth-highest work-related death rate among construction trades nationally. Falls remain the leading cause of death across U.S. construction broadly, with 389 fatal falls to a lower level recorded among 1,034 total construction workplace fatalities in 2024, per OSHA figures drawn from Bureau of Labor Statistics data. OSHA's general fall-protection standard has also been the most frequently cited workplace safety violation for 15 consecutive years, with federal inspectors issuing 5,914 citations in fiscal year 2025 alone.
