Scratch marks on an elevator wall in Xian City indicate how desperate a 48-year-old woman was when she was trapped inside the lift for one month. Maintenance workers have been arrested because of the incident which killed the woman.
The employees of Shaanxi Kaiwen Mechanical and Electrical Equipment Company, who were called to repair the elevator, switched off the power supply that provides electricity to a malfunctioning elevator at the Shuixiehuadu apartment buildings on Jan. 30, reported Mashable. The two workers, who went home afterward for the Lunar New Year holidays and returned on March 1, failed to check first if the elevator had a passenger inside.
When they opened the lift on Tuesday, the maintenance employees found the trapped woman, identified as Wu, dead and the scratch marks on the walls of the lift to show her efforts to save herself or attract attention of other residents. It did not help that the woman lived alone in her flat, so no one noticed she was missing, except perhaps her relatives in the province who missed her presence during the Spring Festival.
The residents explained that the victim was hardly missed because she was not only divorced but also suffering from mental illness. She likewise hardly had any visitors. Some residents are said to have noticed her absence but did not take the matter seriously.
Police blamed the death of the female resident on the gross negligence of the two maintenance workers of the elevator company. CCTV reported that the two would be charged with involuntary manslaughter for failing to properly check the elevator first before cutting off its power supply.
But the residents are blaming more than the two workers. Instead, they said that the property management company of the residential complex, the Xi’an Huicheng Property Management Company, is also negligent because it failed to maintain the apartments’ facilities. Because of the incident, the Gaoling district government suspended the company’s license to operate and it assigned a new property management company.