A 25-year-old woman climbed into a 14th-floor trash chute in New Jersey while drunk and high — and somehow survived a 10-story drop. But getting her out was a nightmare nobody was prepared for.
It started with screams echoing through an apartment building on Main Street in Hackensack, New Jersey — and ended with firefighters hacking through walls and metal just to pull a woman out of a garbage-filled chute, feet first.
On Sunday afternoon around 1 p.m., a 25-year-old woman climbed into a garbage chute on the 14th floor of a Hackensack residential building. Police say she was visibly intoxicated — drunk and high on drugs — at the time. Witnesses inside the building say it was apparently obvious she was under the influence before she ever got near that chute.
What happened next was terrifying. Residents heard a woman screaming as she tumbled downward, story after story, for nearly 10 floors. She didn’t fall all the way to the bottom — a buildup of trash bags packed inside the chute slowed her descent and cushioned the impact, stopping her somewhere between the third and fourth floors.
“All the garbage bags appeared to help break her fall — officials say she was lucky they were there.”
But the same trash that saved her life made rescuing her nearly impossible. Firefighters quickly realized they couldn’t reach her through the chute itself — so they made a drastic call: break through the building walls and cut directly into the metal chute. Crews pulled out mounds of garbage bag by bag before they could finally reach her. One firefighter suffered cuts from the jagged metal left behind during the extraction.
She was pulled out feet first and rushed to the hospital, where she remains with significant injuries to her lower body. Authorities say she had been visiting someone in the building when the incident took place.
What This Means: Hackensack police confirmed that drugs and alcohol were a direct factor in what happened. The building’s garbage chute — designed for trash bags, not people — became the site of a frantic, hours-long rescue operation that left one first responder injured and an entire community shaken.
She survived a 10-story fall inside a metal tube. The garbage saved her life — but the questions about what led her to that chute in the first place are just beginning.
