Man Survives 5-Story Fall From Walnut Creek Building

Chris Hoyle was sitting at her desk in her five-story office building Thursday morning, when she glanced out the window and saw a man falling head first.

“His head was down, his feet were up, and he came whizzing by screaming,” she told the Contra Costa Times. She immediately ran outside where a man was sitting on a low, brick wall.

“Is everyone all right down here?” she asked. “I just saw a man fall off the roof.”

“Yeah, that would be me,” an uninjured Ken Larsen told her.

Larsen, 34, said he was laying telecommunications cable on the roof, walking backward and pulling it. His co-worker at Digital Communications Group in Pleasant Hill, Rick Williver, 46, was holding the spool. As Larsen was about to turn a corner of the building, Williver told him, “Hold it a minute.”

Instead, Larsen took one more step backward--right off the edge.

About halfway down, Larsen realized he might make it. The cable he still clutched had slowed his fall.

After crashing through the branches of a small tree near the ground and unwinding 65 feet of cable, Larsen landed on his feet.

“It wasn’t a really hard landing,” he said. “It was like landing after a parachute jump.”

Meanwhile, back on the roof, Williver braced the spinning spool of cable against a small wall on the roof. After a few seconds, the cable stopped unwinding.

When he peeked over the edge, he saw Larsen walking around on the ground, having escaped with a scratch on his arm and a bruise on his shoulder.

The paramedics, who pointed out that Larsen was a very lucky man, “told me to go buy a lottery ticket,” Larsen said. “And I’m going to.”