SAN ANTONIO --
A 33-year-old man was hospitalized Tuesday morning after police said he fell five stories from a downtown apartment building and was impaled by an iron fence.
Police said Julian Mattes fell out of a window at the Maverick Apartments at around 1 a.m. and crashed onto the fence. Two of the posts speared the front and back of his neck, police said.
Richard Moore was just getting off work at a downtown restaurant when he saw the fall.
"I hear this loud thud. I look up and the whole plate glass window was pushed out, came flying down to the patio here," he said.
Just seconds later, he saw Mattes fall.
Firefighters cut off the bars to free Mattes from the fence, but they weren't able to remove them from his neck.
He was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center.
Police are still looking into what led up to the fall.
"I know that we didn't see any kind of struggle, but that's not to say that there wasn't a struggle, so our investigators are trying to piece this together, trying to find out either how he got pushed or jumped out the window," San Antonio Police Sgt. Chris Benavides said.
According to a police report, there was a chair near the window that police said could have been used to break it.
The keys to Mattes' apartment were also left on the outside of the deadbolt, but no one was inside when police arrived.
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