Firefighters pulled the girl to safety through a small hole they had drilled in the wall.
A teenager shopping at a New York boutique clothing store ended up trapped inside a dressing room that used to be a bank vault. Giavanna Diesso, 14, was trying on clothes when her little brother, Vincent, decided to pull a prank and close the door.
“You just hear it slam, and then I just waited to see if it would open, if they could open it from the outside. And I'm just trying to push on it, and they're pulling and it's just not opening,” Giavanna said.
The teen said she started panicking and getting nervous when it wouldn’t open. Her mom, Danielle, was on the other side desperately trying to pull it open.
“I was extremely scared, I was very nervous. I didn't know how long it would take to get her out. I was hysterically crying,” Danielle said.
The store owner said the lock on the vault-turned-dressing room had been disabled, but because it was 100 years old, it somehow malfunctioned and locked the youngster inside.
Firefighters from Port Jefferson came to the girl’s rescue.
“We were very worried about if this was a safe, any type of air movement or oxygen into her right away, so if you look we popped that hole right away,” a firefighter said.
The first responders used hammer drills and chisels to cut through the 1-foot thick reinforced concrete and brick.
“I just watched the drill pop through the wall and then I calmed down,” Giavanna said.
Finally, after two hours, she was pulled to safety through a small hole in the wall.
She posed for a photo with her rescuers — and that mischievous little brother. Danielle said the boy would have never shut the vault door if he knew how much trouble it would cause.
