A Florida man who was an independent contractor working on renovations in the IMAX theater in downtown Reading fell to his death from a height of several stories, officials said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Robert R. Franklin, 71, of Celebration was working above the ceiling in the R\/C Reading Movies 11 & IMAX, 30 N. Second St., when he fell through a drop ceiling, falling about 50 feet, Berks County Coroner Matthew J. Stitzel said.<\/p>\n
Emergency crews were called shortly after 11:30 a.m.<\/p>\n
Coroner\u2019s office personnel pronounced Franklin dead at 11:57 a.m., Stitzel said.<\/p>\n
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was notified and responded to the theater, Stitzel said.<\/p>\n
An autopsy is scheduled to be conducted Thursday by Dr. Neil Hoffman, a forensic pathologist, in Reading Hospital.<\/p>\n
City police and city fire personnel assisted at the scene.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Florida man who was an independent contractor working on renovations in the IMAX theater in downtown Reading…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,182,139,28,736,128,130,129,432],"class_list":["post-190623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}