Drunk Lawyer Locks Herself Out of Apartment, Tries to Break-In Via Garbage Chute, Almost Loses Arm
On Friday night, a wasted lawyer locked herself out of her Manhattan apartment. Pretty standard stuff, right? I mean, who hasn't done that at some point? Well, what's not so standard about this particular case is the part where the lawyer hatched a convoluted drunken scheme to break-in to her own apartment via her building's garbage chute, a decision that nearly cost the woman her arm.
By the time the attorney, Maggie Baumer, realized she'd loaned her keys to a friend, it was 6 a.m. and she was already outside her apartment building. So she rang every buzzer until someone let her inside. Once there, Baumer decided that, instead of calling a locksmith, she would break in to her own apartment via her building's garden, which apparently is only accessible through the cellar. And the only way to the cellar, according Baumer's drunken thought process, was through the building's garbage chute.
She dove into the chute head first – this is the part where the story gets gruesome, if you want to stop reading – causing her arm to become trapped in the device's trash compactor, which was triggered automatically by the motion.
A piston crushed her arm, cutting almost all the way through, according to an FDNY source. "It was barely hanging," the source said.
At least 17 firefighters responded to the grisly scene, shutting off the power and giving her morphine to cope with the pain, authorities said.
Baumer was trapped for over an hour before firefighters could rescue her, which, gah, awful. The lesson here, clearly, is that when you lose your keys while drunk, you should just pass out in your hallway like a normal person.
