AsiaWireA 90-year-old grandmother, who suffers with Alzheimers, escaped her flat by scaling down multiple floors after her family locked her inside.
Shocking footage was filmed this week in the city of Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province, showing the pensioner cautiously making her way down the outside of the building.
The grandmother was spotted carrying a red fabric bag containing her belongings as she used the metal bars of a ventilation shaft as a ladder to assist in her descent.
Take a look at the heart-stopping scene here:
There is some discrepancy about exactly how many floors the 90-year-old covered as she climbed, but the elderly woman is thought to have climbed out on the 14th floor.
A fire brigade in Chengdu reportedly said on social media that she successfully made it to the fourth floor, where a family opened their windows and helped her inside, away from the treacherous drop below.
However, The Sun report that the grandmother made it to the fifth-floor ledge before she froze, and staff from the gated community came to her rescue.
AsiaWireFirefighters said they were alerted to the incident at around 10am, when eyewitnesses reported that an elderly woman was ‘hanging’ on the face of the building.
One firefighter told Cover News, per the MailOnline, that he and his colleagues immediately went to the scene. The emergency services were about to place an inflatable mattress on the ground under the grandmother when she was rescued.
While her successful escape was certainly impressive, it’s awful that the elderly woman was locked into her house in the first place. A worker from the residents committee reportedly explained the grandmother has Alzheimer’s, which can cause memory loss and disorientation, and affect the ability to think and reason.
The family are thought to have wanted the grandmother to stay in the flat for her own safety, because of her medical condition.
After she was saved from the outside of the building, the pensioner was taken to the ground floor, where thankfully she was found not to have been injured from her incredible adventure.
AsiaWireThe grandmother was later returned to her relatives, who will have hopefully learned a valuable lesson about how to keep the elderly woman safe and avoid any future attempts at escape.
It’s amazing she scaled the wall so successfully, but hopefully she won’t have got a taste for the Spider-Man lifestyle.
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.