Kristen Sargent is lucky to be alive after she plummeted from the eighth floor of an apartment while celebrating her team’s American football victory
A student cheated death when she plummeted from an eighth floor window while “dancing on the sofa”. Kristen Sargent, 21, is currently recovering in intensive care after hurtling from the apartment window in Athens, Georgia, shortly after 7.30pm on Saturday (September 26).
“She was talking to one of her friends and saying, ‘Hey, I’m alive. I can’t believe it’,” her dad, Richard Sargent, told Channel 2 Action News, recalling how fortunate his daughter feels to have survived.
He said his daughter – although “pretty badly beaten up” – has acknowledged she was “lucky that she’s alive and we’re blessed. She’s a good fighter, and so she’s going to be OK”.
Kristen was celebrating the University of Georgia’s success in an American football game when she fell out of the window in The Rambler, a tall college building which flanks a swimming pool.
Responding officer Erik Ellison wrote that officers were dispatched to the building at approximately 7:37pm. “I arrived and spoke with bystanders who advised that the female victim had been dancing on a couch or air mattress which was near an open window and had apparently fallen through the screen and onto the ground below,” he wrote. “When I arrived, the victim was on the ground near the pool, which at this complex is in a courtyard on the second floor of the building.
“It appeared from the scene that the victim had struck a metal bench as she fell, as the cushion on the bench had some blood on it, and the armrest of the bench had broken off.”
Ellison added that all of the witnesses and the victim suggested it was nothing more than a horrific accident. At this time it appears that the victim will survive,” he wrote.
According to the New York Post, witnesses reportedly said a lounge chair may have broken her fall before she hit the ground.