You might think that ground zero, the place they are building the new World Trade Center building, would be among the more secure places in America, right? Not so much.
A New Jersey teen made his way past a sleeping security guard through a hole in the fence and made his way to one the highest points on the building. 16-year-old Justin Casquejo, at 4am Sunday, then got a lift up the tower from a clueless union elevator operator, even though he had no ID.
He was dropped off on the 88th floor and hiked the stairs up to the 104th floor — where a guard assigned to protect the top of the world’s biggest terror target was sound asleep. The well rested guard has been fired.
Casquejo told cops he then climbed up to the roof and made it up to the antenna.
After spending two glorious hours atop the nation’s tallest building snapping photos, the young daredevil was finally caught by a construction worker as he made his way back down.
When cops questioned him, he bragged that he had little trouble getting past security at a building that was supposed to be cloaked in a “ring of steel.”
“I walked around the construction site and figured out how to access the Freedom Tower rooftop,” he said, according to court papers.
Law-enforcement sources said Casquejo got into the heavily guarded site like a kid sneaking into an abandoned warehouse — though a gap in a barbed-wire fence.
“He’s a skinny kid who got through a skinny hole,” a source said.
The elevator operator who asked no questions while taking him skyward has since been reassigned, but will not be fired because of his union status. Nice.
Casquejo faces a charge of misdemeanor trespassing, but his adventure is an epic failure of at least four layers of security at the WTC site, which you would again assume would be more difficult to access after 9/11.
