A Chicago man went to visit his son in the slammer and unwittingly found himself locked up for an excruciating 30 hours.
The father, who has yet to be identified, stopped by the Cook County Jail on Saturday evening for his weekly visit with his son, Farad Polk, who had recently been transferred to a new area in the facility. The man was told to “stay to the right” for the visitor area, the jail’s executive director, Cara Smith, told the Chicago Tribune.
As he walked down the hall, the father walked into a room with the door propped open and shut the door behind him. That’s when the trouble started.
After waiting patiently for about two hours and not seeing a single soul, he realized something was up. The father proceeded to pound on the locked concrete door repeatedly, but nobody could hear him.
Turns out the room is for people visiting super-maximum-security prisoners — and no one uses it on weekends. The waiting area was only open because a contractor had installed new cameras earlier that day, “incredibly, for better security,” Smith said.
“There’s about two feet of cement and two steel doors between him and the outside,” Smith told the Chicago Sun-Times.
After a day without food or water, the man got resourceful and busted a sprinkler head in the room, sending Chicago firefighters to the scene around 1 a.m. Monday.
Other than a few cuts to his thumb, the father is doing just fine.
“While we thank God he’s safe, we’re looking at every single aspect of this case,” Smith told the Sun-Times. “This has never happened, to my knowledge, before.”