Sydney Sneed: Don’t Tempt Fate

Junior Sydney Sneed sits atop a building early in the morning, staring at the stars as the cold wind washes across her face. As thoughts tiredly dance around her mind, she rolls over. Suddenly the ground far below is a bit closer than it was a moment ago, and a sharp pain shoots through her side. Sydney lays there, eyes wide with shock as she looks down towards the ground. . . she thinks, ‘Did I really just fall?’

“I couldn’t sleep. I decided to climb up on top of the building to get my head together in the middle of the night to chill, listen to some music,” Sneed said. “Then I was just leaning over, looking at my feet, and I fell.”

In 2012, Sneed decided to climb to the roof of her father’s apartment building to think, however gravity had other plans for her that night.

“I thought I was gonna die for a second,” Sneed said. “While I was falling everything was really, really fast and then everything just stopped. I had a lot of bruises on my back and my left side. I learned not to look down when you’re really high up and try to touch your toes.”

Sneed often scaled to the roof in the middle of the night to clear her mind. Her escapade to the top and bottom of the building wasn’t her first, but it was admittedly her last.

“[My dad] doesn’t know,” Sneed said. “I went back to bed. . . That’s not something you tell your parents. ‘Oh, yeah! I was on the roof last night.’ ‘What!?’”