Days after a video surfaced on social media showing a young man smashing through the roof of a West Edmonton Mall bake shop, the store’s manager is speaking out about the troubling stunt that went wrong.
Henry Gallant is the district manager at Cinnzeo and said he got a call Friday night from his graveyard shift employee.
“(He said) I may want to take a look at our security camera footage,” Gallant told Global News Wednesday evening. “I see some kid come flying through our roof, he hit our granite countertop, his head bounced off quite badly, his back bent fully backwards and then he bounced forward.
“He was in pain. He was holding his stomach and stuff. And then I see him slowly get up, run out of the store,” Gallant recalled.
“Before the footage cuts out… I can see him collapse on the floor.”
Another video, different from Gallant’s surveillance footage, soon went viral online. It was posted to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. The video shows two young men on the second floor of the mall near the Deep Sea Adventure Lagoon, an indoor lake.
READ MORE: Men jump railing at West Edmonton Mall, crash through roof of Cinnzeo shop
Watch below: Video shared on social media appears to show a teen falling through the roof of a Cinnzeo store at West Edmonton Mall during a failed prank.
The men hop over the railing and onto the roof of the bakeshop below. The first teen is seen jumping on a solid part of the roof, but the other jumps onto a clear area and smashes through.
“It could have been a lot worse, they could have landed on someone,” Gallant said, adding it’s not the first time daredevils have tried such stunts in the mall. After 17 years of working at the shopping centre, Gallant estimates such incidents occur four to six times a year.
“This one’s pretty serious,” he said. “I hope people don’t start doing this… It’s like a 20 to 30 foot drop onto solid rock…the next person might not be so lucky.”
Edmonton police are now looking into the incident and Gallant said he has given them a witness report. When asked about security’s effectiveness at the mall, Gallant said he doesn’t believe that’s the problem. According to him, patrols are up, there are plenty of security cameras and police often patrol as well.
“I think they’re doing everything they can,” he said, “we even have an alarm on our roof.”
It is not known what happened to the young man seen crashing through the roof or how seriously he was injured.
-With files from Karen Bartko.