Karma was indeed a bitch for this woman!
A woman was trapped in the bowels of an East Village hookah bar overnight before the FDNY came to her rescue early Saturday, officials said.
The shellshocked lady emerged from the basement of Karma, a two-level hookah club on First Avenue between Third Street and Fourth Street.
How the woman became trapped in the lounge remained a mystery Saturday afternoon, as Karma remained closed and police said they had no details on the incident.
The FDNY said it received a report of a “person with altered mental status” at 51 First Avenue at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, and that the person was taken to Bellevue Hospital.
At 1 p.m., the black gate over the entrance to Karma, tagged with red, green and white graffiti was still shuttered. The thin black and green railing and gate to the basement level where the woman had been rescued appeared broken and coming apart on the right side.
Smoking a cigarette, Leslie Padilla, 39, a manager at the Ace Hardware next door, said when he arrived at work around 7:30 a.m. Saturday, the woman had already been rescued and was sitting in a car with another man.
“Things happen, it’s a bar, people drinking,” Padilla said about the lock-in.
Neighbors who lived above Karma were less diplomatic.
Ariana Barone, 23, a paralegal, described the venue as “pretty busy” on the weekends, and from Thursday through Sunday, “there’s a pretty consistent music beat in our apartment.”
Word of the abandoned club goer spooked Barone.
“I’m watching ‘Dahmer’ right now, so that’s really freaky,” she said, referring to the Netflix series on the serial killer.
A person who identified themselves as the “owner/manager” of Karma declined comment.
The quirky episode recalls a Friday the 13th incident in 2018, when a man in his 20s called 911 because he was locked inside the Marshall Stack Bar on Rivington Street near Allen Street on the Lower East Side.
In that instance, firefighters responded moments later, opened the door and let the man out. He had been locked inside the bar for more than three hours after 4 a.m. closing time.
