Stuntmen Use Skills to Save Woman at Comic-Con

At San Diego Comic-Con last weekend, three stuntmen jumped into action when they saw a woman dangling from a balcony 14 floors up.

Amos Carver, Gregg Sergeant, and Scot Schecter were preparing for a live stunt event at a private party during San Diego Comic-Con. From their vantage, they saw a woman barely clinging to the 14th-floor balcony across the street.

“The [stunt] coordinator and I were up on a scissor lift. We were a good 30 to 40 feet in the area already working when we turned around and looked,” said Carver. “There was just a lot of commotion; people were screaming and pointing.”

Immediately, the three men lowered themselves to the ground, grabbed their gear, and rushed through the traffic and over a fence in the hopes of bringing the woman down safely. With approval from the apartment building’s manager, the three quietly entered the woman’s apartment—“We didn’t want to alert her that we were there”—and gave it their all.

Sergeant grabbed the woman from behind while Schecter and Carver deftly attached harnesses to her so that even if she slipped, she wouldn’t fall. It took only a few moments, but those few moments saved the woman’s life.

“I was just so thankful we got there when we got there,” Sergeant said. “I think if we’d been there two seconds later, she would’ve been gone.”

“We’re trained to deal with these situations should they arise,” Carver said. “But usually if we do, it’s not an innocent civilian. If we’re saving somebody, it’s a situation we constructed in such a way that they’re out on the edge of life or death intentionally to get a certain shot [in a film], and we swoop in, but those are people that are expecting this.”

The woman may not have been expecting to cling to life on that balcony, and the stuntmen may not have been expecting to save her, but thanks to finely honed instincts and extensive knowledge of life-saving safety measures, the day ended well for everyone involved.