Caught On Tape: Man Trapped Alone In Elevator Over 41 Hours

Nicholas Whites' life changed in an instant. A cigarette break resulted in his being trapped in an elevator, alone, for over 41 hours. He entered car number 30 with one life, and exited to a life distinctly different. Was it a change for the better?

It was a day unlike any other. Nicholas White, a 34 year old production manager for Business Week was working late on a special assignment for the magazine. He stepped out of his office on the 43rd floor of New York's McGraw-Hill building and took the elevator down to street level. Once finished he returned to the lobby, gave a nod to the night watchman and stepped into car number 30, pushing floor number 43. The elevator doors closed, and the car began its ascent. It was an express elevator with no stops between the lobby and the 39th floor. Suddenly there was a jolt, the car stalled and lights flashed on and off.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous.

He had no cellphone with him, and wasn't wearing a watch. He occupied himself by telling himself to remain calm. Help would be arriving shortly. But that help did not arrive until some 41 hours later. 41 hours trapped, alone in an elevator. Video cameras inside the car relay the trauma, both emotional, physical and psychological Nicholas experienced during his period of isolation. With no food or water, or ability to clock time (remember, he wasn't wearing a watch) White's thoughts went from attempting to remain calm, to contemplating death.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

In the video you can see an increasingly distressed White attempting to pry open the doors, lying prone on the floor, banging and screaming in attempt to alert someone to his plight. Eventually his fear was replaced with anger. He pondered why this was happening and why those in charge had not discovered him. Why was no one coming to his aide?

He cast about for blame. He wondered where his colleague was, why she hadn’t been alarmed enough by his failure to return, jacketless, from smoking a cigarette to call security. Whose fault is this? he wondered. Who’s going to pay? He decided that there was no way he was going to work the following week.

And then he gave up. The time passed in a kind of degraded fever dream. On the videotape, he lies motionless for hours at a time, face down on the floor.

A voice woke him up: “Is there someone in there?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing in there?”

White tried to explain; the voice in the intercom seemed to assume that he was an intruder. “Get me the fuck out of here!” White shrieked. Duly persuaded, the guard asked him if he wanted anything. White, who had been planning to join a few friends at a bar on Friday evening, asked for a beer.

No explanation has ever been given as to what caused the elevator to stop, and why Mr. White remained trapped for such an extensive period of time. There was talk of a power surge, but that was never confirmed. Once released, he was hounded by press and friends, associates and members of the legal profession encouraged him to file suit against the McGraw-Hill building management and elevator maintenance company - a suit that took four years. Convinced that returning to work would indicate that he had not suffered severe mental trauma, White never returned to work and eventually lost his job with Business Week, a position he had held for 15 years. The twenty five million dollar settlement he was seeking ended with an award far less than he had been anticipating. Though he is not allowed to disclose specifics, the amount has been reported to be hardly 6 figures. As a result of his elevator ordeal, he lost his apartment, spent all his money, and has searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.

Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator.

An article just published in The New Yorker magazine has put Mr. White back in the scope of the media. Will he handle it differently this time? Will his second "15 seconds of fame" have a better outcome? Reportedly Diane Sawyer will be doing an in depth report on White's harrowing experience in an upcoming ABC Primetime episode. Hopefully his return to notoriety will result in gainful employment, and reflect just exactly what a survivor this man truly was.