ATLANTA — A mother and child were taken to a hospital after part of a stairwell collapsed Thursday afternoon. It happened at an apartment complex on Parkway Drive in northeast Atlanta.
Channel 2's Lauren Pozen learned the mother and her 4-year-old child were on the second-story landing of the staircase when it caved in, sending them crashing to the ground below.
This is what the mother and her child fell through. They were taken to the hospital. Witness tell me it sounded like a construction boulder. Loud. They didn’t know what was going on until they saw the mother and her child on the ground. pic.twitter.com/Zraunx1Pva
— Lauren Pozen WSB (@LaurenPozenWSB) May 23, 2019
Both the mother and child were seriously injured. The 4-year-old underwent surgery.
"They rushed her to Atlanta Medical Center," said the child's grandmother, Johnetta Edwards.
Edwards said she had hoped to spend the afternoon celebrating her granddaughter's birthday, but ended up spending it at the hospital.
“They fell down two flights of steps to the ground. The whole concrete, gone. The whole base, gone. The railing and everything," Edwards said.
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Neighbor Terry Davis told Pozen he heard a loud crash.
“It sounded like someone was throwing something off the building. It was loud like, ‘Pow! Pow!’ That was the impact from the porch falling,” Davis said. “To see her and that baby come out, that just made it worse.”
Edwards said her daughter tried to hold on to her little girl as best she could.
“When my daughter was holding her down the steps, she dropped her and she threw her down the steps,” Edwards said.
Edwards said before the stairwell collapsed, her daughter did mention to management she felt the stairs were unsafe, but nothing was done about it.
“They had been calling into the rent office complaining about the stairwell not being together, but no one came out to fix it,” Edwards said. “I think they need to do something about that because they could have been way more injured than what they was.”
Pozen reached out to apartment management but has not heard back as of Thursday evening.
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