On Sunday, April 28, Ben Jardine suddenly woke up at 5:15 a.m. to a deafening bang.
Jardine, a 28-year-old comedian, lives in a four-family townhouse in Brooklyn Heights with roommates Liz Butler, 30, and Christine Kovode, 26, but soon after, someone raids the house. I was worried that someone might have broken into my home.
When he entered the kitchen and saw the cabinets strewn across the floor, he recalled exclaiming, “Oh my God,” in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE.
“It was really surreal to see everything happening,” he said, describing the moment all the cabinets came off the wall and collapsed.
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Christine Kovode
Kovode, who works as a video editor, encountered the chaos immediately following the Jardine incident. She joked that the noise woke her up while she was sleeping next to her boyfriend, and “we jumped merrily into each other's arms.”
“It sounded like a car crashing into the building,” added Kovode, who moved into the apartment with two roommates in November 2023.
Mr Butler, also a comedian, said he last learned of the kitchen disaster when Mr Jardine ran into the room and told him “the kitchen was on the floor”.
When Butler first walked into the kitchen after hearing the news, she burst into tears.
“The most important and fragile items in the house are in those cabinets. A few things survived, like dishes, but all the mugs are actually gone,” she says. . “So many bowls, so many precious faces. All the glassware was shattered and the household vessels destroyed.”
After the incident, Kovode shared a video of the aftermath on social media, which quickly gained over 2 million views on TikTok, prompting others to share similar experiences.
The roommates also informed their downstairs neighbors about the incident and encouraged them to check their cabinets, as they noticed that their cabinets were also leaning away from the wall.
“Sometimes the only way to deal with it is to try to downplay it,” Jardine says. “Looks like I need to make some lemonade. I have a lot of lemons right now.”
Christine Kovode
The friends added that they have also started making a list of all the items damaged in the crash and their prices. So far, the highest price has gone up to more than $2,000.
“We love this area so much, it's a dream to come here,” says Kovode. “The apartment was very luxurious, so it was quite a shock. We never expected something like that to happen on a Sunday morning.”
Mr Kovode added: “If this had been an hour later, Ben would have made the coffee. Someone could have been seriously injured or killed.”
