Great Escapes: Man wedged in gap; Woman's barbed-wire night

A college student reported missing by friends was recovering on Monday after being pulled from a narrow space between two buildings in New York City, where he had been trapped for up to two days, fire officials said.

Asher Vongtau, 19, an undergraduate at New York University, was found conscious and moaning Sunday afternoon after somehow becoming wedged in a crevice between a five-story parking garage and a 17-story dormitory building in Lower Manhattan, university officials said.

It took firefighters 90 minutes to extract Vongtau from an approximately 18-inch-wide gap between the buildings. Crews had to drill through a cinderblock wall to get to him, according to a spokesman with the New York City Fire Department.

He was taken to Bellevue Hospital in critical condition, the spokesman said. On Monday, his condition was reported to be serious.

The only way into the gap appeared to be from the roofs of the buildings.

"The circumstances of how the student came to be in this space are unclear to us," John Beckman, vice-president for Public Affairs at NYU, said in a statement.

Vongtau was not a resident of the building where he was discovered, Beckman said. He declined to confirm local media reports that the student was from Nigeria.

Woman survives night in barbed wire

A 75-year-old woman spent 12 hours atop downed barbed wire after her vehicle veered off a southwest Arkansas road when she became disoriented driving home from an evening church service.

Authorities in Little River County said Nina Hinton was taken to a hospital for treatment of injuries that were not life-threatening after she was rescued Thursday morning.

Sherry Hendrix and J T Harris, who live near where Hinton’s car left the roadway, found her at about 8:30 am on Thursday.

Harris said he heard a noise and thought it was a goat. Then, he could hear a voice saying, “Help me.”

He contacted Hendrix and she spotted Hinton.

“I told her I was sorry I missed her and didn’t hear the accident,” Hendrix told the Texarkana Gazette.

Hinton’s sedan went down an embankment and hit a tree and limbs, which shattered her windshield. She tried to walk up a muddy embankment but slipped and landed on the barbed wire. The car couldn’t be seen from the street.

Little River County sheriff’s Sgt. Tim Brown said Hinton injured a shoulder and couldn’t get up.

“It was lucky it wasn’t too cold,” Chief Deputy Frank Cole said.

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.