A 33-year-old woman leaped from a 23rd floor hotel restaurant in Buenos Aires, landed on a taxi cab parked on the street below ... and survived, according to reports Monday. The woman, whose name was not released, underwent surgery midday Monday and had a lung, a kidney and her spleen removed, according to officials cited by AFP.
A hospital spokesman told Telam, the national news agency of Argentina, the woman hit the taxi in a seated position -- which likely saved her life.
Had she come down head first it would probably have been a different story, noted Alberto Crescenti, director of Argentina's emergency medical services.
The taxi driver, Miguel Cajal, narrowly escaped death, he told Buenos Aires television station, C5N.
Cajal said he saw a police officer looking up and, following his glance, also looked up. He saw the woman falling and got out of his cab just moments before the impact completely destroyed both the roof and the windshield.
"If I had not got out, she would have killed me," the 39-year-old told local media. "I felt this explosion and I saw this woman's body sunken into the roof of my cab. The first thing I did was call my family. And then I just started to cry; it is really hard to see something like that."
Photographs showed the woman bent into the buckled roof of the black-and-yellow taxi.
Witnesses in the restaurant atop the Panamericano hotel, described how she had calmly ordered a coffee and left her purse behind before taking off her shoes to climb over a safety barrier -- then jumped.
