Asher Vongtau, a student at New York University, was heroically rescued on Saturday after spending more than 36 hours trapped in a 2-foot wide shaft between his dorm room and a parking garage.
Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place!Â
FDNY rescue workers had to break through a cinderblock wall in order to free the young man, who tumbled down the shaft sometime after 7 a.m. on Saturday morning following a routine fire drill in his dormitory.
When Vongtau didn't return from the fire drill and wasn't returning text and phone calls, his friends and family began to worry. They were told he had to be missing for 72 hours before a missing persons investigation could begin.
Thankfully, their persistence paid off and Vongtau was located around 5 p.m. on Sunday evening when campus security found his phone on the roof of the building.
Locating him, however, wasn't quite enough. FDNY workers couldn't quite figure out how Vongtau had managed to get his entire body wedged into such a small place in the first place. Instead of going down the shaft after him, they decided to go through the wall instead.
Vongtau was conscious and able to speak after firefighters rescued him from the shaft and was in serious condition at Bellevue Hospital. He's recovering from a fractured skull, pelvis, and arm, and has multiple contusions on his lungs and spleen.
When his mother asked if he was in pain, Vongtau responded "it's nothing [I] can't handle."
The Hollywood Gossip