Man falls through New York City pavement into 'rat-filled chasm'

A man was trapped in a hole teeming with rats for half an hour after a New York City sidewalk collapsed underneath him. Leonard Shoulders dropped almost 15 feet into the sinkhole and was unable to cry for help out of fear the rats would get in his mouth. “Rats crawling on him. He can’t move. He just… it was so bad,” Mr Shoulders' brother Greg White told NBC News. “He didn’t wanna yell ’cause he was afraid there was gonna be rats going inside his mouth.” The victim had been waiting for a bus in the Bronx when the concrete cracked open and swallowed him whole. The 33-year-old was hospitalised with a broken leg and arm after firefighters worked to extradite him from the pit. He remains in St. Barnabas Hospital and is in a stable condition, but family members have stressed the mental impact of the incident. “He’s traumatised,” Mr Shoulders’ Mother Cindy White said. "He was like, 'Ma, the rats down there were ridiculous.' He was like, 'They were like so big’,” she added.