A New York City man plummeted into a sinkhole full of rats while waiting for a bus on a Bronx sidewalk.
Leonard Shoulders, 33, suffered a broken leg and a broken arm after plummeting nearly 15 feet down into the ground, the New York Daily News reported.
He couldn’t move, and the rats were crawling all over him,” his brother, Greg White, told the Daily News. “He didn’t scream, because he didn’t want the rats going into his mouth.”
Shoulders’ mother, Cindy White, told NBC New York even more of the harrowing details of the incident.
“He went down feet first,” Cindy White said. “He was just standing and the sidewalk just — It was like a suction. Like a sinkhole. He just went down.”
First responders arrived eventually to pull him from the rubble, but Greg White told CBS New York his brother was trapped for 30 minutes.
Firefighters responded and took him to a nearby hospital via ambulance.
“When he fell, his face scraped concrete…that skin came off. His arm was bad. His leg is numb,” Greg White said.
The New York City Department of Buildings said the sidewalk over a building’s cellar had been in poor shape and had given out.
A building inspector has since ordered everyone in the five-story building to vacate the premises and ordered the owner to construct green fencing around it.