A grisly escalator accident at a shopping mall in Jingzhou, China, resulted in the death of a woman who used her last few seconds to save her two-year-old son.
The incident was caught on a surveillance camera, and shows Xiang Liujuan, a 30-year-old stay at home mother, carrying her son up an escalator, CNN reports. At the top, Xiang steps on part of the landing platform that suddenly collapses, trapping her inside.
She manages to push her son to safety, and tries to grab the hand of a shopping attendant, but slips and gets swallowed by the still-moving escalator.
WARNING: The video below contains graphic content that may be disturbing to some viewers.
It took crews four hours to disassemble the escalator and recover her body on Sunday. During that time, a woman identifying as Xiang's sister in law wrote on Twitter, "An ordinary Sunday shopping trip ended up in such a sudden tragedy, almost ruining an entire family.
"The shopping mall is still open and the killer escalators are still running," she added. "Shoppers have no idea about the tragedy upstairs and no one knows if such disasters will strike again."
According to The Guardian, citing an unnamed source, the escalator had just undergone maintenance, and workers reportedly forgot to screw the access cover back into place.
The video was circulated heavily on the Internet in China, and police are investigating the incident.
Online viewers questioned why the escalator didn't stop after Xiang fell inside, and why no one thought to push the emergency stop button, the Hong Kong Free Press reported.
Escalator deaths are relatively rare, but not unheard of in China, where a somewhat cavalier attitude towards safety and quality control has led to multiple incidents.
On Sunday, there was another incident in Beijing where a boy's foot got trapped in an escalator, CNN reported. He was rescued by firefighters and only slightly injured.
In 2012, a nine-year-old boy was killed after getting stuck in a shopping mall escalator in Beijing, and in 2011, a 13-year-old boy died and 20 people were injured when an escalator at a Beijing underground train station suddenly reversed direction in the middle of rush hour.
Fires, building collapses and sinking ships have also been attributed to China's high speed economic development.
That poor woman, how terrible. When her son is older, he should be very proud of her, and very grateful that she saved him. She obviously was a very good woman!