That elevator one always freaked me out
Catching Elevators Elevator number 14 on the second floor of Christus St. Joseph Hospital's George W. Strake building was closed for four days. Since the elevator was being repaired, physician's assistant Karin Leah Steinau took the stairs on Thursday and Friday. On a mid-August Saturday, around 9:30 a.m., the elevator's out-of-order sign was gone, so Steinau pressed the call button.
A few yards away, surgery resident Hitoshi Christopher Nikaidoh was waiting for an elevator beside the doctor's lounge. Steinau moved to join him. Since the hospital elevators are slow, she usually waits midway between the two for whichever comes first.
The elevator nearer Steinau arrived. She stepped onto the double-wide elevator with faux wood walls, and pressed six, Steinau told Houston Police Department officers in a taped interview the next day.
"Is it working today?" Nikaidoh asked.
"I hope so," she replied.
As Nikaidoh stepped onto the elevator, the doors closed, pinning his shoulders. "He tried to pull back and he couldn't," Steinau told HPD officers. "The doors wouldn't open."
She wasn't able to find the Door Open button before the elevator started moving upward. "When you get on an elevator, if it closes on you, it's supposed to open back up," she told officers. "There wasn't any of that. There was no hesitation. The doors shut and it went."
Nikaidoh struggled, trying to shrug out of the elevator, or possibly pull himself inside, she said, but the elevator kept moving upward. The ceiling sliced off most of his head. His left ear, lower lip, teeth and jaw were still attached to his body, which fell to the bottom of the elevator shaft, as the elevator continued moving upward.
Steinau frantically pushed every button; the elevator stopped four feet below the fifth floor. She was trapped inside the elevator with his head for more than an hour.
"I just keep seeing the look in his eyes," she told officers.