What It's Like To Be In A Car Dangling Off The Ninth Floor Of A Parking Garage

Remember the epic rescue of a Toyota 4Runner dangling off the side of an Ausin parking garage? Driver William O'Connor recounted his experience of hanging by mere cables and having to jump out of the precariously-hanging vehicle to the Austin American-Statesman, and absolutely none of it sounds like fun.

O'Connor was easing into an empty parking spot on the ninth floor of the Littlefield Parking Garage only to have his Toyota 4Runner suddenly hop over a concrete parking barrier and through the steel wire meant to keep cars from falling off the side of the top floor of the parking garage. Fortunately, his car got stuck in the wire and was able to dangle there until emergency crews could safely lower it down.

He screamed for his life, as you do in inexplicably bad situations like this. O'Connor told the Statesman:

You know that you're about to die. I feel like whenever I describe it, the words I'm using are inadequate to describe just the sheer terror.

As I was falling, there were thoughts going through my head, like, "I can't believe this is how I'm dying."

After he realized his truck was stuck in the air and he wasn't falling to his death, his screams turned to "Help!" After a few minutes, a visitor from Alabama helped him out of his truck. O'Connor explained the terrifying rescue process to the Statesman:

He grabs one of my hands, and tells me to swing both of my feet up at the same time, so I curved both of my feet up, and swung them out, and he pulled me up, like you're helping somebody off the ground. And that was that.

It took O'Connor a few minutes to regain his composure, after which he shakily went back down to ground level to see the hundreds of onlookers watching his truck get rescued.

O'Connor told the Statesman he wasn't impaired, distracted, or attempting to huff C'thulhu's bath salts at the time. Perhaps he accidentally hit the wrong pedal, or maybe it's C'thulhu's floor mats at work instead. The cause of the truck's sudden lurch forward is still unknown.

Either way, we're all glad no one in the car or below it got hurt.