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Joint rappel teams from Englewood Cliffs, Fort Lee and Edgewater quickly joined others in the search, along with area fire departments, after the alert went out from Palisades Interstate Parkway police.
Officers became concerned after they found Ivka “Joan” Orlic’s abandoned vehicle in the Englewood Cliffs rest stop at the lookout around 7 o’clock last night, PIP Lt. Michael Coppola said. It had been parked there awhile, he said.
A board member of the Bergen County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Orlic was known not only for her work in suicide prevention but also for personal demons she openly struggled with.
Police quickly discovered that Orlic “had not been in contact with relatives in over a day and may be depressed,” Coppola said. That’s when they did the GPS cellphone trace that pointed to the bottom of the lookout, about a mile north of the George Washington Bridge off the Palisades Interstate Parkway.
Rappel teams were called in around 9 p.m., said Coppola, the department’s officer in charge.
“At this time, there does not appear to be any suspicious circumstances involved and the contributing circumstances to her going over the cliff’s edge are still under investigation,” he said at 2:30 this morning.
Coppola later identified the victim as Orlic, who he said had “gone over the cliff’s edge under her own actions. [N]o one else was involved.”
Although signs are posted, PIP police say people frequently climb through the 5-foot-high cable fences just beyond the rocks — either to get what they believe will be a better view or simply to flout the warnings.
It has long been a spot for couples, even though police shoo people away after dark.
Some have jumped, while others have accidentally fallen — or even been pushed — from the lookout over the years.
Last year, a 45-year-old handicapped man was believed to have deliberately gone over the side after leaving his cane and walker at the railing.
A week earlier, a Fort Lee High School student breached the barrier and fell while getting up to leave. Blood-alcohol tests found that he’d been drinking.
Stephen Scharf, a former Army major and member of the Special Forces from Washington Township, is serving a life prison term after being convicted of pushing his wife to her death from the Rockefeller Lookout in Englewood Cliffs 20 years ago.
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