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Italian police are investigating how a 16-year-old British schoolgirl came to fall nearly 9m on to a pavement, suffering multiple injuries, after the window ledge where she was sitting after a late-night party collapsed without warning.
Doctors said Su Cangatin-Ripley had avoided death because her fall, from the second floor of the Hotel Cristallo on the Venice Lido, was broken by the canvas awning of a bar directly beneath her window, causing her to bounce on to a footpath.
The teenager was a member of a party of 42 students and teachers from a private London school.
She is in hospital with head, chest and renal injuries.
Managers at the hotel said they had warned the party about the risks of sitting on the ledges the day before the accident.
Photographs showed the thick concrete sill, where witnesses said Cangatin-Ripley had been smoking, had sheared from its stone frame along almost its entire length.
The hotel manager claimed that students had been misbehaving.
He said he had heard that the students were climbing into other rooms via the windows.
The group of 37 students and five teachers were in Venice to perform five church concerts and had sung in the famous Chiesa di San Pietro di Castello before the accident.
- INDEPENDENT
