Two Wellington Central police officers were in the right place at the right time to rescue a man trapped when the heavy sash of a casement window fell down on his hand.
Senior Sergeant Jason Ross and Constable Hamish Blackburn were heading to a meeting yesterday morning to discuss the city bypass when they responded to the man’s cries for help.
"We’d just parked the car in Kensington Street, in the planned bypass zone, when we heard this young guy yelling for help and waving to us from the second floor of an old house," Constable Blackburn says. "We thought he was having us on but went inside to check it out."
Upstairs they found a very distressed occupant whose right hand and wrist had been pinned by the heavy casement window when it accidentally fell, trapping his hand between the small gap separating the top and bottom windows.
"He’d been stuck there for 10 minutes with a munched up hand while his two flatmates were trying to figure out how to rescue him," says Constable Blackburn.
While Senior Sergeant Ross rang for an ambulance, Constable Blackburn found in a nearby room a metal frame used for carrying luggage and used it to jemmy the window open so the very relieved man’s hand could be pulled free. He was taken to hospital for treatment.
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