CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (TIP): Just after 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 13, a person in Corpus Christi, Tex., had just completed a transaction at a Bank of America A.T.M. when a surprise slid through the receipt slot.
“Please help,” read a handwritten note on a thin strip of paper. “I’m stuck in here, and I don’t have my phone.”
The person, whose age and gender the authorities did not provide, did not know quite what to do. But it so happened that a Corpus Christi police officer was driving by, so the person went a step beyond what other A.T.M. users had been willing to do and flagged down the officer.
The officer, like previous bank patrons, initially thought the note was a joke — some sort of “Candid Camera”-type prank that no one wanted to fall for.
But then the officer approached the A.T.M., and when he listened closely, he could hear a faint sound.
This was how the police came to discover a man who had been trapped for hours inside an A.T.M., said Gena Pena, a spokeswoman for the Corpus Christi Police Department.
“Honestly, we can’t say it’s never happened,” Ms. Pena said in an interview on Thursday. “But 95 percent of people will have their phone on them,” she added, and for about three hours, she said, this man did not.
How does one become stuck inside an A.T.M. in the first place? Ms. Pena said it happened this way:
The A.T.M. was affixed to a bank, which was under construction, so no employees were inside. The A.T.M., though, was operational. And somewhere on the site, a door led into what Ms. Pena called an “A.T.M. vault” — a room from which a person can service a teller machine from the inside.
A worker arrived on Wednesday to repair the “locking mechanism” of the room, Ms. Pena said. The door shut behind the worker, and somehow, she said, the man locked himself in.
The worker, whom the police did not identify, had left his phone inside a vehicle. But once he realized that people were using the A.T.M., the man began slipping notes out the receipt slot, a solution Ms. Pena thought was “pretty ingenious.”
Unfortunately for the man, several A.T.M. users who got a note thought they were being pranked and apparently did nothing.
“He was kind of upset,” Ms. Pena said of the contract worker.
Indeed, the man would later tell the police that he had been screaming for help. Something about the room, though, must have muffled the sound, Ms. Pena said.
The contractor “didn’t think this was going to happen, obviously,” Ms. Pena said. “I feel bad for him.”