UC Berkeley protester says he broke wrist, ankle in fall from tree BERKELEY

One of the tree-sitting protesters in a grove of oaks next to UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium was in the hospital Monday after taking a bone-breaking fall.

Nathaniel Hill, who fell at least 30 feet on Sunday night, was in stable condition at Highland Hospital in Oakland, a nursing supervisor at the hospital said.

"It's just kind of a fluke that it happened," the 24-year-old Hill said in a phone interview from his hospital bed Monday afternoon. He said he broke his wrist and ankle, both of which are in casts.

His father, who had come from New York to see his son, was waiting outside a double line of fences erected by the campus around the protest site when Hill fell shortly before 8:30 p.m., the younger Hill said.

Hill estimated he was between 30 and 40 feet in the air when he fell from a rope he mistakenly thought his harness was attached to.

Protesters have been illegally occupying a grove of oak trees next to the stadium since December. They seek to block construction of a $117 million athletic training center for Cal football players and other athletes.

A judge is expected to rule as early as this week on three lawsuits seeking to block construction of the center.

Hill said he's been in the trees intermittently since the beginning of the protest.

When he fell, inside the fenced area, he had been trying to reach a traverse line running from a tree inside the fenced area to a tree outside the fenced area, he said.

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said Hill was attended by Berkeley Fire Department paramedics before being taken to the hospital Sunday night.

"It's a really regrettable accident but, to state the obvious, completely avoidable," Mogulof said. "Things like that wouldn't happen if the people who are illegally occupying university property were abiding by the law."

Hill said that if UC hadn't put fences around the site, then there would have been no need for the traverse line that he'd been trying to reach.

The number of protesters occupying the trees has varied between about two and a dozen for the past several months, Mogulof said.

Hill said he asked to be taken to Highland Hospital because that's where he was born, although he was raised in Buffalo, N.Y. He said he came back to the Bay Area to participate in the tree protest.

"I really felt a calling to be back in the place where I was born," he said, stressing that he was stirred by the threat to the trees, which would be cut down for the athletic center.

"Initially, the trees called to me," he said, adding that after arriving his motives broadened to include other issues such as protection of Native American burial grounds, which the protesters say are at the site.