Cary Street balcony collapses during party

A crowded second story balcony collapsed around midnight during a party Friday on the 1300 block of West Cary Street. About 20 people were taken to the hospital with broken bones and other injuries.

Lexi Fletcher, a criminal justice major, used to live in the apartment where the accident happened. She says she and her roommate had complained many times to their landlord about the balcony. Fletcher says nothing was ever done to fix the problem.

“The stairs were wobbly and the railing at the bottom was completely loose and wobbling,” Fletcher said.

Fletcher also went to the party Friday night and left about five minutes before the collapse. She said she and her friends left to go to a different party, but she could tell the balcony was not safe.

Fletcher says most people at the party were on the balcony.

“The whole thing was happening on the balcony,” Fletcher said. “The stairs were loose and people kept coming up. I didn’t think it would literally happen, but I was like, ‘It’s going to collapse.’ ”

Fletcher said after they left the party, one of her friends got a phone call when they were a few blocks away. That’s when they found out the balcony had fallen.

“It’s crazy to think I could have been on that balcony and everyone would have been falling around me,” Fletcher said.

Accounting major Sebastian Barrientos arrived at the party a few minutes before the accident and saw the balcony fall.

“It looked like a pit of humans that just got pinned by a porch that just fell down,” Barrientos said. “It was pretty nasty.”

He said the sound of the balcony falling was loud, but hard to describe.

“I’ve never heard that sound before,” Barrientos said.
Police began showing up, according to Barrientos, within 10 minutes of the collapse.

A Richmond Police Department spokeswoman said both the police and fire departments showed up to attend to the injured, who she said, had minor injuries.

“There were about 20 people who were injured and the most serious was an ankle fracture,” she said.

However, communication arts major Matthew Blissard – who showed up shortly after the balcony collapsed – said a friend of his was on the balcony when it collapsed and that her injuries were substantial.

“(She) was at the hospital with a broken face, three broken ribs and a fractured wrist,” Blissard said.

When he arrived, Blissard says many people were still in shock about the incident.

“Some people were crying, some people were fighting, some were just standing there not knowing what to do,” Blissard said. “It was pretty weird because that’s something you don’t expect.”

News Co-Editor Catherine MacDonald and Contributing Writer Jay Scarborough contributed to this report.