Woman Falls 10 Stories Down Hackensack Trash Chute, Survives

A Sunday afternoon in Hackensack turned into one of the strangest rescue calls the local fire department has ever run. A 25-year-old woman climbed into a trash chute on the 14th floor of an apartment building, fell roughly 10 stories, and got stuck somewhere around the third or fourth floor. She lived. The big reason she lived is the kind of detail that sounds made up but isn't: a pile of backed-up garbage broke her fall.

Here's how the whole thing went down, from the 911 call to the saws cutting through metal.

A 911 Call Nobody Was Ready For

The call hit Bergen County Communications at about 1:03 p.m. on Sunday, June 7, 2026. The report was simple and hard to picture: a woman had entered the trash chute on the 14th floor of the building at 150 Main Street and fallen to an unknown spot inside the structure. The Hackensack Fire Department's Second Platoon responded, and they ran into a problem right away. They knew she was somewhere inside the chute. They had no clue where.

Commanders called an "all hands working" technical rescue, which pulled in extra firefighters, Hackensack Police, and EMS crews from Hackensack University Medical Center. Before any of that, though, neighbors had already noticed something was wrong. Tenants on the 14th floor said they heard knocking on everybody's door right before the woman went into the garbage room.

Seven floors down, a tenant named Massiel Gutierrez was dropping boxes off in her garbage room when the sound came through the wall. "She was just screaming in a different language," Gutierrez said. The screaming was coming from inside the chute as the woman tumbled down it.

How Garbage Saved Her Life

The chute is only about 3 feet wide. A drop of 10 stories straight down a narrow metal tube should be the end of the story, not the middle of it. The reason it wasn't is almost too perfect: the trash inside the chute had backed up, and that mound of garbage bags caught her somewhere between the third and fourth floors.

So the same garbage that made the rescue a nightmare is also what slowed and cushioned her fall. Police said she suffered serious injuries to her lower body, which makes sense for a fall like that. But she was alive and stuck, not at the very bottom of the shaft. The pileup that probably annoyed every tenant who used that chute that week ended up being the thing that kept this from being a fatal call.

The catch was that all that trash also buried her. When crews first arrived, they could not see her or get a good fix on her location inside the chute. The garbage that saved her was now hiding her.

Cutting the Chute Open

Once an investigation pinned down that she was wedged near the third or fourth floor, the crews split the job into two plans running at the same time. One team got ready for a rope operation, prepared to haul her up if that became the move. Another team went at the chute itself.

Firefighters grabbed saws and started removing panels from the discharge section of the chute on the side of the building, while keeping a wall breach ready as a backup. Then came the slow part. They pulled mounds of trash bags out of the bottom of the chute, bag after bag, working to clear enough of the backup that she could come down and out.

It worked. Crews kept removing trash until the woman could be pulled out feet-first. Photos from the scene show the metal chute sliced open and garbage scattered all over the floor of the discharge room. The whole rescue, from the first dispatch to getting her free, took about 28 minutes. For the kind of problem they walked into, that's fast.

What Police Say Happened Before the Fall

The obvious question is how a person ends up inside a trash chute in the first place. Police have a partial answer. Their investigation found the woman, a 25-year-old from New York City, had ingested alcohol and a combination of narcotics before things went sideways.

She was visiting someone in the building. According to investigators, she ran out of an apartment while yelling, and at least one witness described her as being in a state of paranoia. Security video reviewed by police showed her alone when she entered the 14th-floor garbage room. That lines up with what the 14th-floor neighbors heard, the knocking on doors before she disappeared into the trash room.

Police did not release her name, and they did not formally spell out exactly how she got into the chute. The screaming Gutierrez heard from the seventh floor came after that, while she was already falling.

One Firefighter Hurt, Everyone Decontaminated

Cutting open a metal chute leaves behind jagged edges, and that caused the one other injury of the day. A firefighter suffered an arm injury during the operation, cut by the sharp metal sheet inside the chute, and was taken to Hackensack University Medical Center.

There was also cleanup most rescue calls don't involve. Because of what crews were crawling through and pulling out, every person and every piece of equipment went through extensive decontamination afterward. Think about that for a second. They cut into a 14-story garbage chute, hand-pulled the backed-up trash from the bottom, and then had to scrub down themselves and their gear before they could clear the scene.

The Building Where It Happened

The address, 150 Main Street, belongs to The Brick of Hackensack. It's a 14-story mixed-use building that opened in December 2021, and it gets described in coverage as a luxury high-rise. So this wasn't some run-down walk-up with a busted garbage system. It's a newer tower, and the chute still managed to back up enough to both catch a falling person and bury her in the process.

Representatives for the building declined to comment when local reporters reached out. That's a pretty common move when something like this happens on the property, but it leaves a lot of questions about the chute itself unanswered.

A Rescue the Fire Chief Had Never Seen

Fire Chief Keith Rosazza did not try to dress this one up. He flat-out called it "very unusual" and said the department had never encountered a rescue quite like it. That's coming from people who run hard calls for a living.

"We're used to unusual falls," Rosazza said. "A lot of the things we train for can be applied to multiple types of scenarios like this, with people trapped, so we go back to our training." He also broke down the part that actually got her out. "They used saws to breach it and they were luckily able to remove the trash out from the bottom that had accumulated in the chute, so that they were able to safely remove the victim that way."

That word, "luckily," is doing a lot of work. A 3-foot chute, a 10-story drop, and the one thing standing between her and the bottom was a clog of garbage bags. The same backup that made this such a difficult, slow, messy rescue is also why there was somebody alive to rescue.

The woman was rushed to Hackensack University Medical Center with significant injuries and remained hospitalized the next day. The hurt firefighter was treated for the cut to his arm. And a luxury tower in Hackensack got a very loud reminder of why those chutes are supposed to stay clear.

It's the kind of call that sounds like a tall tale around the firehouse, except the photos back it up: a metal chute peeled open from the side of a building, garbage knee-deep on the floor, and a 28-minute clock that ended with a person carried out feet-first and still breathing.