Former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst jumped to her death from a skyscraper in New York City on Sunday morning – hours after posting a message on social media saying, ‘May this day bring you rest and peace.’
Kryst, 30, was a lawyer and also worked as a correspondent for the entertainment show Extra. She won the Miss USA pageant in 2019 using her platform to speak out about social and criminal justice reform.
Kryst, who had an apartment on the ninth floor of the luxury building on West 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan, leaped from the 29th floor of the 60-story high-rise around 7:15am and was found dead on the snow-covered sidewalk.
She jumped from an area that was open to the whole building after being last seen on the 29th-floor terrace, sources said.
Only hours before, Kryst wrote on her Instagram page, ‘May this day bring you rest and peace.’
Police found a note in the apartment stating she wanted to leave everything to her mother, a former pageant winner.
There was no explanation for her actions in the note.
‘Not only beautiful but she was smart — she was a lawyer,’ a police source told the New York Post. ‘She has a life that anyone would be jealous of. … It’s so sad.’
As Miss North Carolina, Kryst captured the Miss USA tiara wearing a sparkly winged outfit for the national costume competition, in a nod to Maya Angelou’s ‘I Know Why the Caged BIrd Sings.’
During the competition, she described herself as a ‘weird kid’ with a ‘unibrow’ who’s now part of the first generation of truly empowered women.
Asked in the final round to use one word to summarize her generation, Kryst said ‘innovative.’
‘I’m standing here in Nevada, in the state that has the first female majority legislature in the entire country,’ she said. ‘Mine is the first generation to have that forward-looking mindset that has inclusivity, diversity, strength and empowered women. I’m looking forward to continued progress in my generation.’