The Short Life and Sudden Death of Germain Vigeant

“I knew what happened immediately, but it didn’t make sense,” he says. “She fell, and it was instantaneous. She was gone. It wasn’t like she tripped [over one of the curbs]. You’d think she’d put one foot on the left side or the right side and maybe fall sideways a little bit. But it was just like straight down.”

He says he leaned over the edge of the opening and yelled her name. He ran down to the bottom of the silos, where he’d seen a doorway. He was thinking, he says, of how a man had reportedly survived a fall into a grain elevator. He recalled a conversation with a skydiver, who told him that some people have survived a parachute failure. He was hoping and despairing all at once, terrified and numb, incredulous and dreadfully certain. At the base of the silos, he says, he rammed his shoulder several times against a bolted door. He climbed about fifteen feet up a ladder on the side of the silo. He called her cell phone. Then he called 911.

When Minneapolis police officer Thomas Campbell and his partner arrived at the site two minutes later, Damon waved them down on the street. Damon was, according to Campbell’s report, frightened, shocked, and out of breath, yet able to clearly recount what had happened. With a flashlight in hand, Campbell led Damon up the stairs. The officer recalls it was pitch black, darker than it had been on other nights when he had scaled the elevator in pursuit of trespassers. “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” he says. “It was strange, because up there where she fell there are windows all around. But there was no moonlight. No light from anywhere.”

Germain wasn’t moving when Campbell’s flashlight caught the red of her jacket at the bottom of the silo. Paramedics labored for more than an hour to remove her body, having to enter and exit through a small hole near the silo floor. The autopsy showed she had died instantly. “It was really a death trap when you drop through the floor and go down on your feet,” says Roberta Geiselhart, who oversaw the medical examiner’s investigation. Though the fall, not the alcohol, killed Germain, Geiselhart says she had no second thoughts about listing intoxication as a “significant condition” in Germain’s death. With few exceptions, Geiselhart says, being above the legal limit for driving is listed in accidental deaths when the victim’s decision-making ability is questioned. “Here we have someone walking around in the dark in a grain elevator after she’d been drinking,” she says. “Maybe she could handle that alcohol. Some people can. But it could have impaired her judgment.”

To Ed Ehlinger, overseeing the university’s efforts to stem the effects of high-risk drinking among students, Germain’s decision to climb, not simply her drinking, was the problem. He says the university can’t stop students from partying, but it can strike at the choices students make when they’re drunk, urging them to call 911 if someone has passed out and to wait until they’re sober before taking a dare.

“They’ll still do stupid things,” Ehlinger says. “We’ll never be 100 percent successful in decreasing these high-risk behaviors. But maybe we can decrease it by one life lost, so that a person who’s been drinking doesn’t try to swim across the river or go up in a grain elevator.”

But months after her death, her roommates and East Side friends, gathered in the house where she last lived, are adamant in their belief that alcohol didn’t compel Germain to climb or cause her to fall. More relevant, they say, was the documented lack of security at the towers. Three months before her death, the Southeast Como Improvement Association, a neighborhood group, sent a letter complaining about those lapses to the elevators’ owner, Bunge North America, in Savage. The company said it was addressing the problem with spot security checks. Yet residents were still complaining to the city in January. After Germain’s death—and, coincidentally on the same March day the news broke about her intoxication—the neighborhood group held a meeting to discuss the towers’ safety problems. Still, Germain’s friends say they resented the way some neighbors at that meeting blamed her drinking instead of the company’s questionable oversight.

“They used alcohol and drinking by a college kid as an excuse for not having [the site] more protected,” says Nicole Muzzy, who met Germain when they were U of M freshmen. Mardi Palan, one of Germain’s roommates, agrees. “It’s exhausting,” she says. “If there were no alcohol, there would still be things like this.”