Brace yourselves. This newly-uploaded video shows two people walking to the edge of the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere — One World Trade — and jumping off. And here we were, thinking that a 16-year-old was all that for sneaking past a guard or two .
Though the jump took place on September 30, 2013, it was just uploaded to YouTube today. In fact, this helmet cam footage is the spoils of an operation to find the jumpers, which concluded with their arrests this morning. Four Long Island guys, Marko Markovich, 27, Kyle Hartwell, 29, Andrew Rossig, 33, and James Brady, 32, were arrested after what Long Island Newsday calls “a five-and-a-half month investigation” of video footage from around the area. All three are being charged with third-degree burglary, a Class D felony, and second-degree reckless endangerment, a Class A misdemeanour.
“The intent was for nobody to ever find out and for nobody to get hurt and nobody did get hurt. I’m just trying not to go to jail,” Rossig told the NY Post this morning. It sounds as though the foursome might have even slipped through the same fence hole as Justin Casquejo, who snuck up to the WTC roof last weekend. But according to the Post, the band of Long Islanders went one step (or uh, many thousands of steps) further than their teenage comrade: They walked up all 105 flights of stairs rather than taking the elevator.
Weirdly, the most hand-shakingly scary part of the incredible video isn’t the falling — it’s the cameraman coaxing the first guy to jump in the first place (“you got this, you got this”). I wonder if any investment bankers saw them float by and assumed they must be hallucinating from sleep deprivation. [Newsday; Deadspin]