Teen Fell Down Elevator Shaft At Hollywood Mall

HOLLYWOOD (CBS4) - A game of tag inside a vacant Hollywood shopping mall ended Monday night with a 14-year-old surviving the equivalent of a nearly 3 story drop down an open elevator shaft, police said.

Hollywood Police Lt. Norris Redding said the girl was among half a dozen kids, ages 13-15, who scaled an eight foot tall concrete wall around the long-vacant Hollywood Fashion Center on Hollywood Boulevard at U.S. 441, then entered the now-extinct Jordan Marsh department store through an apparently unlocked door.

"They started playing tag, and the victim fell down the cargo elevator shaft."

Investigators examined the scene Tuesday and found the door to the elevator shaft was open. The girl apparently stepped off the edge, plunging into darkness. She suffered contusions and lacerations to her head and body when she landed on top of the elevator, about 25 feet below.

Sources close to the investigation told CBS4's Gary Nelson that the girl's friends at first fibbed, saying she had fallen from a masonry wall along the mall's property line.

The other youngsters went to a home about a hundred yards away where someone called rescue. Police and paramedics determined the girl's injuries and symptoms were too severe to have come from a short fall off a wall. She was incoherent and semi-conscious.

The truth about the foray into the mall and the plunge down the elevator shaft was subsequently revealed, sources said.

Lt. Redding said the girl remained at Joe Dimaggio's Children's Hospital Tuesday, but her condition was vastly improved.

"She is conscious and she is talking" to investigators, Redding said.

Police have refused to release the names of any of the kids involved, citing their ages and an on-going investigation. No one answered the door Monday afternoon at the home where the girl's friends first took her following the fall.

The Hollywood Fashion Center was a major shopping destination in its heyday - housing a Burdines, Jordan Marsh and JCPenney - but fell victim to urban flight to the western suburbs and the emergence of mega-malls.

New owners acquired the property in December, 2009, and have plans to redevelop it. Lt. Redding said the vacant mall had been a problem for the city, but the new owners have done a good job of keeping it boarded up and secured.

"They are in code compliance with the city," Redding said.

It's not clear why the door the children used to enter the mall was apparently not locked, but Redding noted that they first had to scale a tall wall to get to the door.

Messages left for the mall owners, listed in property records as Palm Beach 2000, Inc., and Vestmaz, Inc., of Dania Beach, were not returned Tuesday.