Girl's 6-floor city plunge

Photo / Steven McNicholl

A North Shore 18-year-old is lucky to be alive after falling multiple storeys from a central Auckland carpark building during a night of drinking and taking Ecstasy.

Friends say she fell six or seven storeys and is in Auckland City Hospital with breaks in her vertebrae, a punctured lung and three broken ribs. But doctors say she will walk again.

The young woman comes from a well-off Devonport family, and last night her parents spoke of the help they had tried to get her for the drugs they believe she was taking daily.

The couple - whom the Herald has agreed not to name - want the incident to be a warning to other parents, saying "you need to spy on your children", looking at who their friends are and what they are writing on networking sites such as Facebook.

They said they had become aware of her problems and two days before the fall, they took her to a doctor to get professional help.

"Her friends thought she needed a night out before she looked at some sort of rehab facility," her distraught mother told the Herald.

The teenager - who finished her studies at a North Shore high school in 2008 - was drinking at a friend's house last Wednesday night before the group went clubbing and drinking, including at Margaritas bar on Elliott St.

They ended up at a carpark on Albert St, where she became separated from her friends.

She was on the sixth or seventh floor and apparently looked over a barrier when she heard her friends' voices.

"In her state she thought that she could just jump down to the next level, but she fell instead," the mother said.

St John ambulance spokesman Keith Hall said the service received about three calls from the public about 4.30am last Thursday.

The mother said: "When I saw her, when they got her as stable as they could, I didn't know it was her. It was like, it couldn't be my daughter. It didn't look like her, it didn't sound like her ... it was gut-wrenching.

"The doctor said, 'I can't believe you're not in a wheelchair. It's frightening how close you came'."

The mother said her daughter's torso would remain in a cast from her chest to her groin for about four months.

Emergency services identified the address as the corner of Wyndham and Albert Sts. The nearest carpark building is operated by Tournament Parking.

Operations manager Tony Joyce said last night that he had not heard of any incident on Thursday morning but he was aware of kids hanging around the building.

"It tends to be on weekends mostly, so we have people regularly patrol until 1am. Sometimes it's hard to keep on top of it."

The teenager, who has two siblings, aged 21 and 20, started a diploma course in sport and recreation last year with the aim of becoming a physical education teacher.

But she was born with a heart defect and doctors told her it would be impossible.

Her parents believe things started to take a turn for the worse at the beginning of the year when she broke up with her boyfriend and started seeing a group of friends more regularly.

She had just finished a three-month contract working at a magazine.

The mother said her daughter would return to the family home "to crash or raid the cupboards" but she had been living with friends over the past few months.

She met her daughter for breakfast at a cafe in Takapuna last Tuesday and told her she needed help.

"This time last week, we talked about it. I was worried. I arranged to have the day off work. I arranged to meet her for breakfast.

"She didn't want to acknowledge it. She was very upset. She walked off.

"I went and picked her up from where she'd run off to. We came home, I took her to the doctor and we started the ball rolling as far as getting help. She indicated quite strongly that that's what she wanted.

"Kids are really bored these days. They are sophisticated and they are bored. They are accomplished liars. You can be convinced into believing it's under control."

The mother said she and her husband "thought we were monitoring her and we were communicating with her. You just don't know what they're doing".

"Because of texting and Facebook, you can so easily be shut out of your children's lives ..."

The mother said it was shocking how easy it was to obtain Ecstasy.

"You need to spy on them. You do. You need to go through your children's phones, their diaries, be actively looking. Don't believe what they're telling you. Look at who their friends are and go with your gut instincts.

"Don't ever forget: your children are not your friends. They don't have to like your decisions."

Late last month, a 15-year-old student survived a fall from his family's 16th-storey apartment in Manukau City. He broke several bones and suffered a gashed leg and internal injuries after apparently falling feet first.

Before hitting the ground, he smashed through a steel roof at about 100km/h. The roof probably saved his life.

A New York doctor who had dealt with many falls said in 2008 that the death rate from a three-storey fall was about 50 per cent. But people who fell more than 10 storeys almost never survived.

Neil Thomson, an associate professor in the University of Otago physics department, spelled out the unlikely escape from more serious injury or death.

He said a person falling from 45 to 50 metres would reach a speed of 100km/h by the time they struck the ground.

The impact would be twice as strong as slamming on the brakes in a Formula One racecar at full speed.