MILWAUKEE — As fans made their way into American Family Field Sunday the topic of conversation for many standing in line was the escalator malfunction at the stadium from the night before.
After Saturday’s Brewers game against the Cubs, 11 people were injured with six of them rushed to local hospitals after an escalator at the ballpark suddenly sped up with dozens on it.
Cubs fan Ben Castellanos told TMJ4’s Tahleel Mohieldin he was there when it happened.
“The escalator completely just did some sort of a freefall type thing, where it sped up completely,” Castellanos said. “You would have thought they were going down a slide how fast they were coming down.”
He said he was on the escalator when it jolted a couple of times but got off just in time. Many others weren't so lucky.
Castellanos said he and other fans immediately tried to step in to help but as people rapidly fell to the bottom, to prevent further injury, they had no choice but to wait until everyone was down.
Watch: Fans talk to TMJ4 about escalator malfunction at American Family Field:
“It was just piles and piles of people on top of each other,” he recalled.
His friend Nicholas Moreano was among them and he said there were about 70 people on board the escalator when things went bad.
“I almost contemplated just jumping off the escalator like I literally got up on the railing,” Moreano recalled.
But too fast, he ended up on the ground with bodies quickly piling up on top of him. Madisonian Roger Wolkoff was also caught up in the chaos, with people both below and on top of him.
Wolkoff estimates the escalator was going three times its normal speed.
“My heart was pounding,” he said. “I was so fearful that either a loose piece of clothing or a shoelace of mine, or somebody else right— my fear was they were going to get stuck."
Thankfully other fans were able to pull both men out to safety, the two walking away with minor scrapes and soreness, but Moreano won’t soon forget what he saw when he looked back at the aftermath.
“There was an older lady and she was just kind of screaming and yelling,” Moreano remembered. “That just makes it all worse, just hearing that and when you’re also looking back there’s blood on the escalator.”
It’s an incident that has some fans calling on American Family Field leadership to better prioritize fan safety.
“I figured they’d have at least some sort of ushers there to kind of stop a few people from getting on,” Castellanos said. “That way something like this just doesn’t happen.”
Castellanos later reported seeing staff at Sunday’s game manning the escalators and he hopes that becomes the new norm.
Stadium Leaders said a physician and EMS are also regularly on-site, whom fans estimated arrived 5 to 7 minutes after the escalator malfunctioned.
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