According to a preliminary police investigation, a male employee in his 20s who works for the store was escorting a 16-year-old boy out of the location on Exterior Street in the Melrose section just before 11:15 a.m. when things turned physical.
Police say during the scuffle, they bumped into the elevator doors which opened up and they both fell down the shaft.
The teen landed on top of the elevator cab, but the employee somehow slid in between the shaft and the cab.
Firefighters were able to removed the teen relatively quickly and he was taken to Harlem Hospital for treatment of serious, but non-life threatening injuries.
The employee, on the other hand, was lying, conscious, but critically injured, in the pit of the shaft.
Crews secured the elevator before emergency medical technicians were hoisted down into the pit to treat him.
Firefighters set up a pully system and about an hour later hoisted the man, secured to a spine board, up and out of the shaft and he was taken to Lincoln Medical Center.
Shoppers celebrated the rescue.
"We train every day for something like this and when it happens, we're ready to go," an FDNY official said.
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