The NYU student trapped in a narrow building crevice for up to 36 hours told cops he was drinking and tumbled from a fire escape into the gap, sources told The Post on Monday.
Asher Vongtau, 19, left his pal’s room on the 10th floor of the student dorm at 80 Lafayette St. early Saturday to go down to a small interior courtyard between the buildings, sources said. Students usually hang out in the space to smoke or drink, sources said.
Vongtau then climbed a fire escape on the building next door and reached the second or third floor before slipping and — in a freak twist of fate — landing in a 6- to 18-inch gap between the structures.
He remained there — on the ground, trapped between the concrete walls — until a campus security guard searching for him heard him moaning the next day.
At that point, he was wedged into the space so tightly that he could only move his right arm.
FDNY crews used heavy drilling and excavation equipment to bust through a ground-floor cinder-block wall to reach the pre-law student. They finally pulled him out around 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
“He’s probably the luckiest kid alive,’’ one fire source said.
Vongtau’s best friend, Michael, Yabon, 19, who lives at the dorm, said he last saw his pal early Saturday, when they were in his room “hanging out … playing video games.’’
Then “he said he wanted some fresh air” and left, Yabon said.
Yabon said he and their friends realized Vongtau was missing after a false fire alarm went off around 7 a.m. and nobody saw him around.
“We went door to door asking everyone we could if they had information on him,’’ Yabon said.
Friends posted frantic messages on Facebook and Twitter asking if anyone had seen Vongtau and reached out to his family in Pittsburgh to see if they had heard from him.
No one knew anything.
So “we went to campus security,’’ Yabon said.
The student griped that NYU security told them it couldn’t check its security cameras to try to track Vongtau’s movements until Monday.
Campus guards also said they wouldn’t immediately be notifying the NYPD, Yabon said, and that when he went to the Police Department, they agreed with NYU.
“He’d be dead right now” if his friends hadn’t pushed to find him, Yabon said.
But NYU spokesman John Beckman said the university followed protocol after being contacted about the missing student at 12:30 a.m. Sunday.
Campus security “immediately began a search, checking the student’s room, reaching out to friends, checking area emergency rooms, checking local precincts and checking on the NYU locations where his ID had most recently been used for entry, among other efforts,’’ Beckman said in an e-mail.
Someone reported finding Vongtau’s shoes on the seventh floor of the dorm.
A security guard then discovered Vongtau’s iPhone on the fire escape.
And “one of our public-safety sergeants, in the course of his search of the building extended his search to a narrow space between our building and an abutting garage, where he discovered someone wedged into the space and heard moaning,’’ Beckman said.
“The FDNY and the NYPD were immediately called.’’
Vontaugh’s mother, Habiba, told reporters at Bellevue Hospital that her son suffered a broken pelvis and other shattered bones, including an arm, as well as bruises.
But “he’s doing well. … He’s in good spirits,’’ she said.
Vongtau’s dad, Lulufa Vongtau, tweeted from the family’s native Nigeria on Monday:
Spoke to Asher, he’s in good spirits.his mother and I are grateful to God for this gift! Thnx for ur prayers! It is well’’
How Vongtau wound up in the gap was so mystifying to cops that two officers arrived at the scene Monday saying, “My boss couldn’t figure it out, so he asked us to come here and figure it out.’’
One Lafayette Street pal described Vongtau as “a very responsible person, more so than most college students.”
Vongtau lives in another dorm, but “he’s literally, four, five days out of the week, here … or we’re out [there],’’ the friend said.
He said Vongtau is studying pre-law in the Liberal Studies program.