Comment An American tourist in Italy survived a fall into the Vesuvius crater after reaching for his phone to take a selfie, Italian police and local officials said. A 23-year-old Baltimore man was hiking the famous volcano with his family on Saturday when they reached the summit of Mount Vesuvius via a restricted trail, Naples police told local media. When the family reached the top of the volcano, known for destroying the Roman city of Pompeii, the man, identified by NBC News as Philip Carroll, held out his phone to commemorate being at the top of a 4,000-foot volcano. But when the man’s phone fell into the crater at about 3 p.m., the situation worsened, Paolo Cappelli, president of the Presidio Permanente Vesuvio, a base atop Vesuvius where guides work, told NBC. Instead of retrieving the phone and taking the perfect Instagram photo, the man slipped and fell a few feet into the crater. “This morning a tourist for reasons yet to be determined… together with his family ventured down a forbidden path, reached the edge of the crater and fell into the mouth of #Vesuvius,” wrote Gennaro Lameta, a government tourism official. Facebook. Cappelli told Il Mattino, a Naples newspaper, that a group of volcano guides on the other side of the rim used binoculars to realize the man “had slipped into the crater and was in serious trouble,” noting that the American tourist was stuck. “Four volcano guides were immediately set in motion and, arriving at the site, one of them descended with a rope for about 15 meters to allow them to secure the unwary tourist,” Cappelli said, according to a Google translation. He noted that Carroll could have dived 300 meters, or nearly 1,000 feet, into the crater. A photo posted by Lametta on social media shows the man with bruises on his legs, arms and back, as well as bloody scratches on his elbows. Lametta wrote that the man was unconscious when drivers pulled him up. Police told CNN the man was taken by ambulance further down the mountain, but refused to go to a hospital. Cappelli told local media that Carroll was taken into custody by local police. It is unclear what charges he may face. Attempts to reach Carroll and his family Tuesday were unsuccessful. Almost two millennia after a deadly explosion in 79 AD. which left the cities of Pompeii, Oplontis and Stabiae covered in ash, Vesuvius remains one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions. While Vesuvius technically remains an active volcano, the last eruption was in 1944 and the volcano is now dormant, according to the Vesuvius National Park website. The highest point of the volcano is about 4,190 feet. Vesuvius’ crater is nearly 1,000 feet deep, with a diameter of about 1,500 feet. The Baltimore man survived, but others who tried to take pictures in scenic but dangerous locations were not so lucky. A 2018 study by researchers associated with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, a group of public medical colleges based in New Delhi, found that more than 250 people worldwide had died while taking selfies over a six-year period. Of the 259 deaths reported from October 2011 to November 2017, the researchers found that the leading cause was drowning, followed by incidents involving transportation — for example, taking a selfie in front of an oncoming train — and falling from a height. Other selfie-related causes of death include animal attacks, gunshot wounds, and electrocution. “Selfie deaths have become a major public health problem,” Agam Bansal, lead author of the study, told the Washington Post at the time. More than 250 people worldwide have died taking selfies, according to a study A study published last year in the Journal of Travel Medicine estimated that 379 people had died taking selfies from January 2008 to July 2021. There are more recent examples of deaths linked to selfies. Richard Jacobson, a 21-year-old hiker in Arizona, fell hundreds of feet to his death in January after walking to the edge of a cliff to take a selfie in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix. Police told local media that an investigation into Jacobson’s death showed no signs of drug use or foul play and concluded that the death was “just a very tragic accident.” Cappelli and Lametta praised the volcano guides for quickly recognizing that the American tourist was in danger of plummeting into Vesuvius’ crater. “Having spoken directly with the rescuers, I can safely say that last Saturday in Vesuvius they saved a human life,” Cappelli told Vesuvio Live, according to a translation. Allyson Chiu contributed to this report.
