New York's Most Charming Young Man Was Nearly Killed by a Falling Mattress Yesterday
Jesse Scott Owen, a freshman at King's College in Manhattan, was knocked unconscious in the street Tuesday when a futon guided by the invisible hand of a vengeful angel, fell on him from a height of "at least" 30 stories.
Gothamist hypothesizes that the mattress was blown off the rooftop of a nearby spa.
Owen, who moved to New York City from Florida three weeks ago, ignoring his grandparents' warnings that a nice boy like him wouldn't last one month in the big city without being felled by a mattress, could not have been more charming about the incident.
First there was his setting of the scene.
"I was walking on the left side of the street," he begins, adding, without explanation "-which I never do."
After he was knocked out, Owen says he awoke to bystanders laying him out on the mattress. When he asked these good folks why they had taken it upon themselves to lay him out on a mattress, they explained that the mattress had just attempted to crush him, a situation Owen found "kind of hysterical."
One of the Good Samaritans took Owen's wallet and phone, called his mother, and gave his information to the police. And hopefully, at that point, returned Owen's wallet and phone. (On Twitter, Owen noted that he keeps his wallet in his front pocket, likely as a mugging deterrence. Unfortunately, no wallet is safe from the hail of mattresses crashing down on Gotham.)
Even after he was sent to the hospital and told he suffered a possible herniated disc, Owen remained upbeat about the incident, calling the unprovoked attack "an experience. And I am really happy I am not dead."
Most charming of all, though, was Owen's reaction to Internet reports of the story. These, he notes with pride, identify him not as a flim-flam country sham, but as a man.
"When I first Googled it to see if anyone had written about this I tried searching 'boy hit by mattress wall street' and that didn't work. "So I tried 'man hit by mattress' and [the Gothamist article] came up. I was psyched. 'That's right, I'm a man now! They said it was a man knocked out on the sidewalk.' "
Good luck out there, young man. Keep your wallet in your front pocket, don't buy "designer perfumes" on the corner, and, above all, never ever walk on the left side of the street.
