The condition of a child who was rushed to hospital Thursday afternoon after falling from a southwest London, Ont. apartment building has improved, police said Friday.
Emergency crews were called to the scene at 301 Baseline Rd. W in the city’s Southcrest neighbourhood around 1:45 p.m.
“Paramedics were called for a young child that had fallen an unknown height at an apartment building,” said Miranda Bothwell of Middlesex-London Paramedic Services.
“Paramedics arrived, they provided care, and ended up transporting the child to the hospital.”
The child was in critical condition as of late Thursday afternoon, police said. Their age was not immediately known.
In an update late Friday morning, police said the child’s condition had been upgraded from critical to serious.
The building, part of a two-tower residential complex known as Garden Vista Apartments, is undergoing renovations. The building has no balcony railings on its north side, and only a handful on its south side.
An employee of the construction company who was at the site when the child fell told Global News Thursday that the building’s balcony doors are pinned from the outside for safety, allowing the door to open roughly three inches.
“It is impossible, unless they were to smash a window, to get onto the balcony,” the worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said.
The worker, who was outside the building with a colleague, described the moments after the child fell as being “chaos,” with police and paramedics responding within minutes of being called.
Although they didn’t see the child fall from the building itself, the worker said they believed the toddler fell from the window of a seventh-floor apartment.
“We had seen this kid multiple times in weeks prior … we saw this kid in the window trying to screw with the screen,” the worker said.
“He was in the window screwing around with it and trying to open it. We were screaming at the kid — this was back, like, March break time — we were screaming at him and the parents, being like … ‘get that kid out of there!’
“When this kid fell in front of my co-worker, he knew right away, he’s like, ”Yeah, it’s the kid from that floor.’ He saw him hit the ground right in front of him. He’s pretty shaken up.”
Global News reached out to building owner Skyline Living for comment on Thursday but had not received a response as of early Friday afternoon.
— With files from Sawyer Bogdan
Comments