"That's horrifying," you say, "Why don't they have cameras or something in those elevators?" Oh, they do. Here's his entire ordeal, compressed into a three-minute clip and uploaded to YouTube:
At two minutes in, you see him try to climb out of the hatch at the top (it was locked) and repeatedly open the doors as if at some point he'd magically see something other than concrete there (some of those times, he's pissing down the shaft). So, yes, you now understand the truly disturbing part of this story: None of the security guards paid close enough attention to those video feeds to notice that there was a guy frantically trying to escape Car 30 for nearly two days. Five different shifts went by, this man trapped in plain sight, until finally someone noticed that, wait a second, there's a dude sleeping on the floor of one of the elevators.
At first a security guard thought a bum had sneaked into the building, so he buzzed the intercom to ask what was going on. After White determined that it wasn't God speaking, but an idiot security guard, he showed his ID to the camera and a mechanic was sent to free him from his prison. Yet the building staff couldn't even get that right -- when the elevator doors opened and White could see farther than 6 feet in any direction for the first time in 41 hours, he burst out into the hallway, only to see that the maintenance crew was waiting for him at the wrong elevator door down the hall.
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