Seventeen trapped inside elevator for over five hours after late show in Kalyan mall

Yogesh Sadhwani (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 09, 2010)

Seventeen people stepped out of a night-show of Once Upon a Time In Mumbaai only to walk into a real life psycho-thriller that lasted five and a half hours. The group, with two children in its midst, spent the night trapped in a packed lift at the Metro Junction Mall, Kalyan (East).

At first, when the lift stalled between the first and the ground floor around 12.30 am, the people trapped inside thought it was a minor malfunction and they would be home soon. They banged on the door and shouted for help.

Mall officials rushed to the site and opened the door but the space between the elevator and the first floor was so small that the victims could not be brought out.

After this, as minutes turned to hours, panic mounted. Those trapped could barely move. Not only were there far too many of them but they also feared the lift would crash if they didn’t stay still.

With only a small opening for fresh air, they were petrified of suffocation. Dinesh and Reena Chadda were in this lift with their two-year-old son Aarush. “My son was asleep for the first three hours. But when he awoke he started bawling. That was when things took a turn for the worse for us,” said Dinesh, a real estate consultant and a resident of Kalyan. His wife added, “The lift was packed. I was filled with feelings of dread that we would not make More >