A five-year-old boy has died after his head became trapped between a table and a wall at a revolving restaurant.

Charles Holt suffered serious injuries at the rotating Sun Dial restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia, after wandering off and becoming lodged between furniture fixed to the moving floor and a static wall, police said.

The automatic safety system in place at the restaurant, on the 72nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel, stopped the floor rotating after the boy became stuck on Friday night.

Restaurant staff freed him but the boy, from Charlotte, North Carolina, was left critically injured and later died in hospital.

Warren Pickard, a spokesman for the Atlanta police department, said: “The kid was just wandering as kids will do. Somehow he found himself in a critical situation where he’s lodged in between the rotating floor and the wall.”

Police said his head was caught in about 13cm of space and that he was found to have suffered crushing injuries to his head. He was identified on Saturday by the Fulton County medical examiner’s office.

The Sun Dial restaurant has not responded to requests for comment. A representative for the business told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper it would be closed until further notice.

The hotel is a fixture on the Atlanta skyline. The three-level restaurant opened in 1976 and features a revolving restaurant, a rotating cocktail lounge and an observatory deck with 360-degree views of the city more than 200 metres above ground level.