Fire service
Playing hide and seek: Child locked in locker in Munich
Actually a great hiding place: the locker (symbol image)
© Schöning / Imago Images
A child crawls into a locker, which locks automatically and cannot be opened. Only the fire department can free the child.
Two boys are playing hide and seek. One of them secretly climbs into a locker, the door closes and locks. Once closed, the locker can no longer be opened. The child is inside, the parents are outside and there is no one else around. A horror scenario that a family experienced on Sunday evening in Munich. The fire brigade had to come to rescue the child.
Actually, the family had only wanted to collect their luggage, it was already around 10 p.m. It was deposited in an automatic luggage storage facility near Munich Central Station. The two boys, seven and nine years old, were playing while they were there.
Hiding place in locker becomes prison
“Unfortunately, the door slammed shut, the locker locked and could no longer be opened,” the Munich fire department wrote in a press release. “As it was an automated storage facility, there was no service staff on site.” After the staff of the private storage company could not be reached by phone, the desperate parents had no other choice but to call the fire department in their time of need.
The Munich fire brigade arrived. According to their own statements, they quickly managed to pry open the locker – and thus free the child. The rescuers: “The boy was able to be handed over to his relieved parents unharmed.”
Not the first case of this kind
It is not the first time that someone has locked themselves in a locker. For example, Baden train station has already been called out twice because young people had locked themselves in lockers: in 2009 and 2011. According to the local fire department, these were probably tests of courage. In Ingelheim in 2020, a twelve-year-old girl crawled into a station locker for fun – and was then accidentally locked in. The fire department had to be called there too.
Sources: PM Fire Department Munich, Merkur, Fire Department Baden-Stadt, Frankfurter Neue Presse, with material from DPA