By Catherine Addington

LSP sophomore Asher Vongtau, 19, was rescued after being trapped for more than 35 hours between NYU’s Lafayette Hall and a neighboring parking garage Sunday evening, after a ten-story fall the night before. FDNY and NYPD confirmed to NYU Local that Vongtau was found conscious and was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he is now in stable condition.

The rescue began at approximately 5:36 p.m., according to the FDNY Twitter. They also reported the rescue “under control” at 6:44 p.m. and posted that firefighters had breached walls in the process.

During the rescue, the block outside Lafayette Hall from Franklin to White Streets was crowded with officials from the fire department, the police department, and NYU Public Safety, as well as press organizations. Students were directed to enter through the emergency exit on White Street.

NYU Public Safety officials told reporters outside Lafayette Hall that the student was reported missing on Saturday and was found by a public safety official on Sunday who had been looking for him. However, NYU students Michael Yablon and Nicholas Liem, in addition to a third student who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive situation, told Local that they were Vongtau’s “best friends” and that Yablon and the third student were the last people to be with him before his disappearance, when Vongtau left Yablon’s room at Lafayette Hall early Saturday morning to “get some air”. After Vongtau did not return a half hour later, the students started calling friends and beginning a search, which they claimed was ultimately more instrumental in Vongtau’s rescue than searches lead by NYU Public Safety.

According to Liem, the three friends began to worry even more around 5 p.m. on Saturday after not being able to reach Vongtau by phone or email. They contacted NYU Public Safety officials about Vongtau’s disappearance at 12:30 a.m. Sunday. The friends reported that NYU Public Safety followed what they called “protocol” and emailed and called Vongtau, to no response. The Public Safety officials told the trio that a person could not be considered missing until 72 hours had passed, but that they would check to see if Vongtau had swiped in at any buildings or been reported at any precincts or hospitals. Public Safety officers found no reports of either, but continued their search for him in other buildings.

Multiple phone calls and emails to Jules Martin, vice president for Global Security and Crisis Management, and John Beckman, vice president for Public Affairs, regarding the students’ claims were not returned, although we will update you with more information and their comments as it becomes available.(UPDATED BELOW WITH A STATEMENT FROM NYU)

Yablon says he was informed that missing persons reports could only be filed by the family of the missing person or by the institution with which the person was affiliated, in this case Vongtau’s family in Pittsburgh and NYU, respectively. The three students say NYU Public Safety told them not to contact Vongtau’s mother, and this advice was repeated by the NYPD at 5 a.m. Sunday when the three students met with police officers at Alumni Hall, where Vongtau is a resident. Yablon said the police believed at the time that Vongtau was likely with his mother, but Yablon said that could not have been the case since he was not responding to any communication by phone or email.

A few hours later, the three contacted Vongtau’s sister Zoe via Facebook. Yablon says they had been reluctant to approach her with concerns before knowing for sure that something had happened to Vongtau, but they felt the police and NYU Public Safety had “left us with no other option.” Through Zoe, the friends began a dialogue with Vongtau’s mother, who purportedly called NYU Public Safety — and, later, the NYPD. But by that time Vongtau had already been found.

In the meantime, Yablon says he asked NYU Public Safety officials on Sunday morning to search security footage of the Lafayette building for any sight of Vongtau. Public Safety officals told Yablon that the footage was kept at a location only open Monday through Friday, and at that point Yablon said, “we decided to take matters into our own hands.”

The three friends posted Facebook statuses asking if anyone had seen Vongtau, and got a response saying his shoes had been found on the seventh floor of Lafayette Hall. Yablon says the three went door-to-door on the seventh floor in response to this information and learned from residents that Vongtau was last seen heading up the stairs at approximately 7 a.m. on Saturday, when a fire alarm was set off and the building was evacuated.

Sophomore and Washington Square News photographer William Martin, who was on the scene taking photos of the accident, spoke to reporters outside Lafayette Hall on Sunday night, claiming that the fire alarm was believed to have been set off by a prankster, but that the identity of the person who set off the alarm is unknown.

Lafayette resident Amanda Stewart told Local that a seventh floor dorm window was also smashed in yesterday morning around the same time as the fire alarm. Stewart speculated that the prankster committed the damage in order to feign a firefighter’s entrance by taking the phone off the hook and opening the electricity box, as FDNY did not report any involvement in yesterday’s events.

Liem reported that he, Yablon, and the third student began searching the stairs for clues after speaking with seventh floor residents. They speculated that Vongtau used the emergency exit to the roof from the eighteenth floor stairway, and the additional alarm set off by the door went undetected in the midst of the noise caused by the fire alarm. Yablon said that at 3 p.m. Sunday they took this information to NYU Public Safety officials, asking them to search the roof, or at least its cameras’ footage, for signs of Vongtau.

A few hours later, NYU Public Safety officials searched the roof and found Vongtau in the 1.5- to 2-foot crevice between Lafayette and a parking garage. Yablon said officials conducted this search following up on their tip, and that Vongtau’s cellphone was found on the roof before he was discovered in the crevice.

Yablon, Liem, and the third student said they now have a meeting scheduled with officials at NYU’s Office of Residential Life to discuss their concerns about the current missing person’s protocol, which they feel is deeply problematic. “I’ve lost faith in the authorities. They would have failed had it just been left to them doing their thing. They would not have succeeded in saving him,” said Yablon. “They should be thanking us. John Sexton doesn’t want that kind of press on his hands.”

“It’s scary that they have these resources behind them and got nothing,” added Liem. “If they had not been bureaucratic, and took this as an individual case, they would have done what we did and found him.” Liem also responded to early reports that a campus security official discovered Vongtau by looking for a camera. “As far as we know, that is bullshit,” he said, “or at least it was after the fact.”

The third student added that if NYU Public Safety officials had checked the roof’s camera, “they could have found him 24 hours earlier.”

Editor’s Note: A previous statement by Nicholas Liem regarding Public Safety’s 72-hour hold was in reference only to filing a missing persons report, and not a search, which Public Safety began immediately. We regret the error, and the story has been updated with the correction.

UPDATE: We now have received a statement from Vice President for Public Affairs John Beckman:

NYU’s Dept of Public Safety first received word of the missing student — a male undergraduate — shortly after midnight on Sunday morning from other students and immediately began trying to locate the student. This involved checking the student’s room, reaching out to friends, checking area emergency rooms, checking local precincts, attempting to communicate with the student electronically, checking on the NYU locations where his ID had most recently been used for entry, and checking with Public Safety officers who are stationed at posts around campus, among other efforts. These are commonsense first steps when we start a search. Later on Sunday, possessions of his were found by students at 80 Lafayette St., and the Public Safety Dept’s efforts were focused there. In the course of our search there, one of our Public Safety sergeants extended his search to a narrow space between our building and an abutting garage, where he discovered someone wedged into the space and heard moaning. The FDNY and the NYPD were immediately called; they responded and rescued the student. Our understanding is that the student was conscious and able to communicate with rescuers throughout the rescue. The student was transported to the hospital. The circumstances of how the student came to be in this space are unclear to us. It does not appear to us that he could have gotten there from the roof. I can assure you that suggestions about Public Safety waiting 72 hours or requiring a family member to file a report before beginning a search are totally and 100% false; it is simply not true. Other students are a common source of reports such as this — because they tend to be in contacts with fellow students more than parents, staff, or faculty, so they are typically the first to recognize something is amiss — so of course we don’t wait. And it is contradicted by the facts in this case — the search for this student began immediately after it was reported to us (ie shortly after midnight on Sunday). However, Public Safety had been told that the last time the student was seen was when he was exiting 80 Lafayette during a fire alarm (the alarm turned out to be false). When new evidence emerged — the student’s possessions — at Lafayette on Sunday afternoon, Public Safety focused its efforts back there.”

UPDATE 2: We reached out to Asher Vongtau’s friends for their comment on John Beckman’s response. Below is the statement we received from Nicholas Liem:

“I want to respond to campus security’s defense statement. We did not ever accuse them of wanting to wait 72 hours before looking for him. We accused them of wanting to wait 72 hours before declaring him missing, which would lead to a higher alert, cooperation with the police, and contacting his mother. The places where they physically were looking were no where near where he was last seen, as they were standard procedure places to look (classrooms, Bobst, etc.). Furthermore, the whole point of checking the buildings was next to useless because they already knew he had not swiped in anywhere. Again, I will clarify that they DID refuse to contact his mother and DID refuse to file a report with the police before 72 hours. The police would NOT accept our report without it being from his mother. Therefore, we were left with no assistance from NYU, other than the standard steps they were taking, which would not have been enough had students been highly, highly involved. What annoys me is that they suggest that they had found the crevice where Asher was on their own. That is 100% false. I know because a police sergeant demanded to see me when I arrived on the scene, and told me that they had been led to the crevice by finding his phone on the roof — where we directed them. There is no way on earth that their procedure would have found him on time. After these “first steps” were taken, they were coming up empty handed. It only took them so long to carry out the first steps, and in fact, they completed the first steps Saturday night/early Sunday morning. What they wanted to do from there was wait another 24 hours until they did anything else. All they said they were going to do was repeat some of the steps they had already taken. All of these reasons are why I am upset with how they handled the situation.”

UPDATE 3: We have received further clarification from John Beckman, who consulted with NYU Public Safety to give us a clearer account of what occurred, according to NYU.

At about 12:30 am on Sunday, Public Safety was notified about the missing student by Mr. Liem. Mr. Liem indicated to Public Safety that the missing student had left Lafayette St. sometime early Saturday morning — nearly 17 hours prior — and not been seen since (though, as it turns out, Mr. Liem did not have this as first-hand information). Two other students who were in the room in Lafayette St. where the missing student had been had indicated that they had fallen asleep at about 5:00 am, and when they woke to the fire alarm at about 7:00 am, the missing student was no longer there. Let’s be clear that when a member of the NYU community reports another member of the NYU community as missing, we treat that report at face value from the beginning. We do not have some other category that activates after 72 hours, and the NYPD’s policies do not have an effect on when NYU starts looking for a student. Following that report at 12:30 am, in the very early morning hours of Sunday, Public Safety went to the missing student’s room, and to the room where he had previously been at Lafayette. Despite working off of information that indicated the student had left the building, Public

Safety also searched the common areas of the residence hall — the lounge, and the computer room. Public Safety did not do a search of Bobst or classroom buildings. They did proceed with the other common-sense steps they typically take to

locate a missing student: checking the card swipe system, checking emergency rooms and hospitals, checking with the local precinct (these

last two being places from which a person might be unable to keep in contact by cellphone), trying to text and to call. The next contact with Mr. Liem was at about 4:30 am. He indicated that he wished to call the police, and Public Safety said they would meet him at his residence hall with the NYPD. The police indicated their policies about missing persons; again, this did not have an impact on NYU, which had started a search right away. I am not aware of any requests or suggestions for a further search of Lafayette by the missing students’ friends until the next contact, which

was approximately 12 hours later. At that point, Mr. Liem and the two people from the room in Lafayette — in the company of an RA — went to the Public Safety officer on duty at Lafayette to say they had found the missing student’s shoes and socks, and they believed that the missing

student had gone to the roof. That information — first provided at about 4:30 pm on Sunday — refocused the search back on Lafayette. A Public Safety sergeant, based on this information, searched the roof. Contrary to Mr. Liem’s assertion, nothing was found on the roof. The sergeant, however, extended his search to other parts of the building, including other areas customarily off-limits to building residents. On a fire escape that serves the next door building — a garage — the sergeant found an iPod or iPhone with the student’s picture. Realizing the

implications, he looked further, and heard the student’s moans. Respectfully, I think if one looks at this, at each turn, the Public Safety Department 1) took the reports seriously and did not wait to act,

2) followed common-sense steps to try to find the missing student, and 3) responded by adjusting their efforts to the information they had. That having been said, we take what the students are saying seriously. We see this matter differently than they do: the University obviously did

not wait 72 hours or require the involvement of the family before we initiated a search; we promptly took common sense steps upon receiving the first report that he had exited 80 Lafayette by reaching out to the student electronically, going to the student’s room, checking area medical

and police authorities, checking our card-entry and with public safety officers on post, etc. We then promptly re-focused our attention back on

Lafayette as soon as students made us aware of the missing student’s possessions being in Lafayette. Even so, we believe that we can learn

something from every incident, even ones that have a happy ending, and there is a reasonable argument to be made that a more thorough search of the building in the first few hours of Sunday morning would have been appropriate, the information that the student had left the building notwithstanding. So our Public Safety Department will be reviewing what happened here with an eye towards what lessons should be incorporated for our response to missing person reports going forward. I want to add one other point. In our public statements, we should have acknowledged the importance of the missing student’s friends in initiating the search and helping to bring it to a conclusion. We may differ in the way we see how the events unfolded, but we do respect the students’ concern for their friend and persistence in helping to make sure he was found and rescued.

[Top Image via/Bottom Image via Catherine Addington]