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Teen falls six stories, walks away with scrapes

A teenager fell six stories from a hotel balcony in South Carolina but walked away with just bruises and scrapes.
/ Source: The Associated Press

A teenager fell six stories from a hotel balcony but walked away with just bruises and scrapes.

Matthew Savage, 17, was reaching up to a balcony one floor above to grab a bathing suit that had fluttered down from the 11th floor when he tumbled over the railing Friday.

The teen, from Gainesville, Ga., hit other balconies on his way down and slammed onto a slanted rooftop, then slid into bushes.

“I just closed my eyes,” Savage said, nursing scrapes and bruises on his back and legs.

After landing in the bushes, he got up and started walking back to his room. But paramedics strapped him to a board and flew him to a hospital, where tests showed he was fine.

“This was a ‘God is real’ event,” his sister, Mandy Baker, said.