Boy, 8, Survives 6-Story Plunge Down Trash Chute

An 8-year-old boy was throwing trash down a garbage chute Wednesday when he fell through the opening, plunging six stories down to where trash was piled up to the second floor. His 13-year-old aunt rushed to another eighth-floor resident of the Honolulu condo building asking for help, and 29-year-old Dan Kaetsu broke a glass fire-hose box and threw the hose down the chute, reports the Honolulu Star-Advertiser via the AP. The boy grabbed the hose and used the walls of the chute for support as Kaetsu pulled him back up to the eighth floor. Somehow the 8-year-old only suffered a few cuts.

"He was screaming he couldn't breathe. It was tight," Kaetsu tells Hawaii News Now. "I told him to hold on tight [to] see if he could use walls and try to walk his way up. We had to stick our whole entire [bodies] into [the] chute to see him. I just tried to talk to him while I pulled him up, just encourage him as he made his way up." (More uplifting news stories.)