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Interesting Things with JC #1767: "The Spider-Man of Paris" – A four-year-old boy hangs from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. Mamoudou Gassama climbs the building with his bare hands and reaches him in about 30 seconds.
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Interesting Things with JC — 1767: "The Spider-Man of Paris". Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
On May 26, 2018, Mahmoudu Kasama, he was walking through Paris, France when he came across a crowd staring up at an apartment building on Rue, Marx, Dormois. Four floors above the street of four-year-old boy was hanging outside a balcony railing. A neighbor on the adjoining balcony had managed to grab him, but he couldn't pull him across. Kasama, he started climbing. He had no rope, no harness, no safety equipment, and using his bare hands, he pulled himself from balcony to balcony up the outside of the building. In about 30 seconds, he reached the fourth floor, swung himself over the railing, grabbed the boy and pulled him to safety. By the time the firefighters arrived, the rescue was over. Kasama was 22 years old. He grew up in Mali, where he had no formal schooling and worked farming, Millette. He eventually made his way to Paris, France, where he was working construction
jobs and living in a migrant hostel in Montreux-Yay. Video of the rescue spread across the world, people began calling him the Spider-Man of Paris, and two days later, French President Emmanuel Macron, he invited him to Alize, Pallice. Kasama received a medal for courage and devotion, and later spent 10 months in civic service with the Paris Fire Brigade. The attention, it eventually faded. Kasama, he married. He became a father of two and settled into a much calmer life in Montreux. He wanted a working jobs that included security work. But the part of the story that lasted less than a minute, that's the part the people still remember. A child hanging four floors above a street in Paris, a crowd watching from below, and a 22-year-old man who saw the same thing that everybody else saw.
But he was the one that climbed. These are interesting things with JC.
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