A woman is facing multiple mischief charges after being found in a crane in Toronto’s downtown core early Thursday morning.
Emergency crews were called to a construction site in the Lake Shore Boulevard and Bathurst Street area at around 6:30 a.m. after receiving reports about a woman sleeping shirtless inside the cab of a crane.
Toronto District Fire Chief William Bygrave said the cab, which is where an operator would normally sit, is about 13 storeys high or about 45 metres.
Negotiators worked for about an hour to convince the woman to come down.
By 8 a.m., the woman had joined officers on a platform where she put on a shirt and safety harness. She was handcuffed by officers and brought down to safety.
Bygrave said emergency crews struggled to get the woman to comply. When the woman eventually agreed, she climbed down the ladder without much assistance.
It’s not clear how long the woman had been on the structure, or how she got up there in the first place.
“We don’t know how she got in there. There was security during the evening but no night shift working so the building was empty,” he said.
“It’s precarious up there. She didn’t have any safety gear on so she was in danger.”
Once on the ground, the woman was loaded into an ambulance and checked over by paramedics before being taken into a police cruiser to hospital.
In a news release issued Thursday evening, police say the woman damaged the crane, rendering it inoperable.
Toronto police identified the suspect as 34-year-old Lindsey Flockhart and said she is facing numerous mischief charges, including damaging property exceeding $5,000, obstructing property exceeding $5,000 and failing to comply with a probation order.
She is scheduled to appear in court Friday.
At the height of the ordeal, a team of firefighters, negotiators, members of the Emergency Task Force and a “high-angle rescue team” were called to the site.
The boom of the structure hangs partially over the Gardiner Expressway, which was a cause for concern for rescuers and prompted the closure of two eastbound lanes.
A crowd of construction workers and passersby gathered near the site to gawk at the strange early morning sighting.
One construction worker who showed up at the site at 6 a.m. said he didn’t notice anything until daylight started to break. When he spotted the woman, he said he notified management who instructed them to shut down the crane.
“There was a girl hanging clothes… She was hanging her own clothes on the crane. I have no clue what else she did,” he said. “Obviously she wasn’t in the right state of mind.”
Crane rescues are not unfamiliar to Toronto’s downtown.
In April of 2017, a 23-year-old woman had to be rescued after scaling a construction crane in the Church and Wellesley streets area. The nearly three-hour rescue drew national interest and spurred the nickname “Crane Girl.” The woman pleaded guilty to two counts of mischief but was granted an absolute discharge earlier this year.
Bygrave said emergency crews were called to a similar situation in the city just yesterday.
“It’s not uncommon, it does happen,” he said. “People get into these sites and they do climb up cranes for some reason. It’s pretty dangerous.”
