Therese Hipolito, 20, of New Jersey, went out drinking with a girlfriend at Boss Tweed's lounge in Manhattan's Lower East Side, the New York Post reports. Sometime before 4 a.m., when the bar closed, she went into the bathroom — and fell asleep.
Somehow, closing staff never found her. Hipolito woke up alone a few hours later. She called 911 just before 8 a.m.
"She was a little upset," a police source told the local paper. "She woke up, and she was in the bathroom."
The cops came and heard her shouting from the other side of the bar's roll-down gate, according to the report. Officers sawed through a lock on the gate and freed her at around 9:20 a.m., still in her night-on-the-town dress.
Cops say the bar now has a lot to answer for. Hipolito, after all, is under the US minimum drinking age of 21. Police are looking into whether the girl used a fake id to get into the bar or whether Boss Tweed's admission policies are simply lax.
"They're going to have some issues now. We're really going to look into this deeply," one officer said.
Hipolito, a law student, says she thinks someone drugged her, and plans to sue the bar.
"I would never be in the city just drinking," she told the New York Post. "I was at a friend's birthday party. I had one shot and one glass of champagne. And the last thing I remember, I go get a slice of pizza with my friend and we sit back down in a booth [at the bar] and that was my last clear memory.''
Hipolito doesn't know how she could have been missed by the bar's staff.
"How do you not notice someone sleeping on the floor of your bathroom? There are only two stalls,'' she said. "I'm going to sue them.''
She's not the only one concerned about Boss Tweed's hygiene practices. "Do they not clean up their bathroom?" asked Sweetina Kakar, a 26-year-old who lives in the neighborhood. "Maybe we shouldn't be drinking there."
