King's student home after 16-storey plunge

Proximity Apartments in Manukau, Auckland where a 15-year-old student fell 16 floors. Photo / Sarah Ivey

A King's College boy who survived a 16-storey plunge with little more than a broken arm is out of hospital and eager to get back to school.

A week after a carpark roof broke his 50m fall from the Proximity Apartments in Manukau City, the 15-year-old has been discharged from Middlemore Hospital.

King's chaplain Warner Wilder said the Year 10 student was in great spirits and dubbed his survival "an absolute miracle" after a horrific year for the college.

"He's bubbling, he really is," he said yesterday. "He would like to be back at school next week but it's going to be a week or two."

The teenager's parents moved out of the apartment block near the Westfield Manukau shopping mall after his fall late last week and it is understood the family are staying in a motel and on the look-out for a new home.

Proximity building manager Jason Epps-Eades said the family had asked for privacy during the recovery, and the Weekend Herald has decided not to identify the boy.

Mr Wilder said he had taught the teenager - who transferred from nearby De La Salle College last year - and planned to talk to him about his faith. "I must say when it first happened I wondered what God was doing and then I suddenly realised he performed a real miracle," he said.

Mr Wilder had taken the student's closest friends into hospital to visit and said he was talking and eating and looked like his old self.

Early indications were he suffered a broken wrist, a broken rib, a gouged leg and internal injuries, but a hospital official refused to comment.

King's College has been plagued by tragedy this year with the deaths of students James Webster, 16, after binge-drinking at a party, 15-year-old Michael Treffers after an incident at a Southern Motorway overbridge and William Thode, 15, to a rare viral infection.

Yesterday, the teenage survivor's friends expressed their relief via social networking site Facebook with: "Welcome back bro", "the wolfpack missed you pal" and "Welcome back! D hope your feeling alot better".