‘TERRIBLE TRAGEDY’

7-Year-Old Boy Killed by Elevator in North Carolina Vacation Home

Despite resuscitation attempts, paramedics said the child’s head and neck were crushed by the elevator.

A 7-year-old boy from Ohio was killed Sunday after he was stuck in an elevator at his family’s North Carolina vacation home, The Charlotte Observer reports. Paramedics rushed to the Outer Banks house after a 911 call that night, finding the boy lodged between the bottom of the elevator car and the top of the home’s door frame. Authorities tried to revive him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene due to his neck being crushed between the elevator’s inner accordion door and its outer door. “It’s just such a terrible tragedy,” Rich Shortway, the fire chief in Corolla, North Carolina, said. The family had arrived earlier that day for their vacation.

The incident is one of a number of close calls between home elevators and children. The Consumer Product Safety Commission sued ThyssenKrupp’s elevator arm three days before the boy’s death in an effort to get them to recall elevators linked to other child deaths.