Man Bizarrely Trapped Behind Wall Saved by FDNY

NY Post – January 11, 2017

by Joe Marino and Amanda Woods

A man needed to be saved by firefighters after he plunged six stories down an air shaft in a Manhattan building and became lodged behind the wall of his neighbor’s apartment.

The man climbed up the fire escape to the roof of his building in Kips Bay shortly after midnight before entering the air duct, the building super told the Post.

“When the guy was asked why the hell he was in the vent, he said . . . that was the initiation for being new to the building,’’ a source said of Nikhil Kothari, 28.

Suddenly, Gjyste Margilaj, 33, who lives on the first floor of the building, heard a crash.

“I could hear him through my kitchen wall,” Margilaj said. “I opened the vent so he could breathe. I heard panting and breathing.

“I freaked the f–k out and then I answered him and talked him through it.”

Margilaj said the man claimed he was a doctor or resident, but didn’t make sense and “wasn’t coherent at all.”

Members of the FDNY freed him from the wall after about 40 minutes and he was taken to Bellevue Hospital with minor injuries.

With Shawn Cohen

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