Kristin Sargent told first responders she had not been harmed by anyone after her eight-story plunge from a Georgia dormitory.
Sargent, 21, spoke to EMTs from her hospital bed in the bodycam footage obtained from Athens-Clarke County Police, delivering a clear message amid the chaos of her rescue. “No one did anything bad to me,” she said, according to the recording.
The University of Georgia student had been drinking and celebrating with friends at her eighth-floor, five-bedroom apartment in Athens, Georgia, last September when the accident occurred. She was dancing on a couch and singing along to Miley Cyrus’s 2009 hit “The Climb” when she fell backward through the screen of an open window, a roommate told officers in the footage.
Police suspect Sargent’s intoxication may have played a crucial role in her survival. Officers believe she was so drunk that she forgot to brace her body as she fell, which lessened the impact when she landed on a cushioned metal bench 65 feet below. She suffered serious injuries including a fractured femur and a hole in her chest, but the outcome defied all expectations.
One friend who rushed to the scene after the fall admitted to an officer what she had feared upon hearing the news. “I thought I was coming down here to see her dead,” she said in the bodycam footage.
The same friend later marveled at Sargent’s resilience in the face of the catastrophic drop. “I would die if I fell from that. She’s just a beast,” she continued. “We were all like, if anyone’s gonna come back from this, it’s Kristin.”
Another roommate provided officers with the fuller context of the evening’s events, explaining how a night of casual drinking and music had turned catastrophic. The group had been enjoying themselves with beers and Cyrus’s anthemic ballad when Sargent’s dancing carried her backward through the window screen and into open air.
Sargent faces a lengthy recovery period following the September incident, according to her loved ones, though the bodycam footage captures her already displaying the fighting spirit her friends recognized. Her first words to medical personnel focused on absolving others of responsibility even as she lay seriously injured.
The fall occurred at an off-campus apartment complex in the college town of Athens, where University of Georgia students often reside in multi-story buildings. The metal bench with its cushion, positioned directly below the window, appears to have been the difference between life and death in a city where such vertical drops typically end fatally.
Friends who gathered at the scene expressed their disbelief that Sargent had survived the 65-foot plunge, with their reactions captured in raw form on the police recording. The bodycam footage shows the immediate aftermath as officers arrived to find the student alive but grievously injured, her friends still processing the impossibility of what they were witnessing.
Sargent continues her recovery from the injuries sustained in the September fall.