Sad news from Mississippi State University: A 21-year-old junior died falling from the football stadium Jumbotron early Saturday morning, WTVA reports. Seems the student, Andrew Scott Demboski, climbed up on the scoreboard with two friends and fell roughly 18 feet from a metal awning, landing head-first on a platform and going into cardiac arrest. Responding firefighters removed him from the platform but his landing place made him hard to reach, the Dispatch reports. Paramedics tried restoring Demboski's pulse for about an hour while he was moved, but couldn't save him.
"What he was walking on was not designed to be walked on," Oktibbeha County Coroner Michael Hunt tells the Clarion-Ledger. "We're lucky all three of them didn't get hurt." County officials and MSU are investigating, but easy access to the Davis Wade Stadium scoreboard has already been discussed on an MSU message board. The university released a statement saying Demboski was a "very talented" Environmental Economics and Management major, while Marissa Gonzalez, described as Demboski's girlfriend on Facebook, wrote a post about his death. Demboski was "a very simplistic guy who made you laugh under any circumstance," she writes. "I love him more than words can say. I'm praying for him and his family for peace." (More Mississippi stories.)