A man believed to be under the influence of drugs attempted to crawl through a hospital ceiling. However, his venture was short-lived after he became stuck in the confined space. The incident occurred in the San Antonio Regional Hospital, in California, US.
According to the X post shared by Upland police, the unnamed man was a walk-in patient who entered and was last seen on surveillance footage entering a restroom. “Once officers got there, we confirmed on surveillance footage that the subject was seen going into the restroom and never coming out,” Upland police said in a statement.
Last night around 9 PM, we received a call from the San Antonio Regional Hospital regarding a subject who broke through some ceiling tiles in one of their emergency room restrooms and was now somewhere inside their ceiling. Okay Monday, we accept.
We learned the subject was a… pic.twitter.com/gCmyVX0qUW
— Upland Police Department (@UplandPD) November 20, 2024
The police later discovered that the man had broken into the ceiling crawled into the cramped space above them and was located above the toilet in the Emergency Room (ER).
The space was meant for “wires, plumbing, Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) lines, etc”. The officers used a pole camera to look inside the space and saw the patient wedged under a steel beam.
“Due to the extremely confined space, maze of wires, plumbing, HVAC lines, etc, officers had to use a pole camera to look into the ceiling. Within moments, the subject was located on top of a large HVAC unit and wedged under a steel beam in complete darkness,” police said.
As per the police statement, the firefighters were called to the scene from the San Bernardino County Fire Department were called when the man who was firmly wedged in the hospital ceiling, admitted he couldn’t free himself. They spent close to an hour trying to instruct the man to move out of the confined space. He also caused damages worth $5000.
However, the hospital staff weren’t distracted by this chaos and emergency services were not interrupted. The man, however, was arrested for vandalism.
