A Columbia student was hospitalized this morning after he got stuck on the roof of a dorm building and tried to climb down an air shaft, reportedly after a night of extremely heavy drinking on Saturday.
The trouble for the student, identified by the News as 29-year-old William Tarng, apparently started when he was kicked out of a party in the dorm building on Morningside Drive for stealing food. After that, Tarng reportedly wandered around the dorm building, at one point wandering into a suite that didn't belong to him.
"He wasn't threatening, but he was definitely belligerent, and he was just standing up there being like 'I can't believe you guys made me sing,' and we had no idea what he was talking about," fellow student Zane Bhansall told ABC7. Bhansall also told the site that Tarng was stuffing Oreos into his mouth and was finally tricked into leaving the room when Bhansall's roommate told Tarng that his jacket was outside.
According to the Post, Tarng was banging on doors and walking into various dorm rooms, stealing food and booze. The situation turned much darker though, when Tarng managed to get on the building's roof.
A police spokesman said that after Tarng made it up to the roof, he climbed into an air shaft and fell four floors, getting stuck on the 16th floor of the building. Students told the Post that Tarng might have climbed into the shaft after realizing the door to the roof locked behind him. The FDNY and ESU eventually rescued him from the wall, but not before he had been stuck there for eight hours according to ABC. The police spokesman said that Tarng was brought to St. Luke's Hospital with minor bruising, and said he was "a lucky guy," all things considered.
“This guy was s- -t-faced at a party. Instead of going down, he went up,” a law enforcement source told the Post.
Tarng is the second person in the last two months to get himself stuck on a roof and require rescue by the fire department. In January, a Kips Bay woman met her new neighbor when he decided to come downstairs off the building's roof by climbing down the air shaft and got stuck in the wall behind the woman's kitchen.
