On July 30, a 21-year-old girl was clamped by an elevator before she fully stepped in it in Hangzhou, East China’s Zhejiang province. She showed no vital sign when the fire fighters eventually rescued her out, and died an hour later in hospital.

The tragedy happened when she returned home. The elevator went up before she fully stepped into the cartridge, and she was clamped by the neck. Fire fighter said that when they were trying to rescue the woman, her body was still on the 16th floor, while her head was on the 17th.

The dwellers of the building did not dare to use the elevator any more. One of them even carried a mattress to climb the stairs.

One dweller on the 17th floor said that the elevator had long been problematic. Sometimes it could not be closed, the dweller said.

Around the end of last year, the property management department put up an announcement, saying that they had “set aside a sum of money to fix the elevator”.