Jan. 09--When John Connors returned home to his Ravenswood Manor apartment Tuesday evening, his frightened cat, Oscar, darted out of the house as soon as he opened the door.
Inside, he understood why.
At first he thought the building's roof had collapsed from water damage, sending wood and ice tumbling into his apartment. But upon closer look, he found what he believes was the culprit: large ice chunks that somehow fell out of mid-air.
"I could actually see the sky from my room," Connors said of the large hole in his ceiling. "One of the beams in the roof was completely shattered."
Connors said that his neighbor heard what she thought was an explosion around 11:30 a.m. She went outside to investigate, but neither she nor the mailman saw anything.
He discovered his "disaster" of a living room hours later. As he and a friend tried to clean it up, he collected four dense white pieces of ice.
"Putting two and two together, I saw these giant pieces of ice and figured that this must have been what came through the roof," Connors said.
No one was hurt, and the ice did not crash through the lower floors of his building. Three of the ice clumps, weighing 15 to 20 pounds altogether, are in Connors' freezer.
Connors said he has a sense of humor over the oddity but acknowledges that some good fortune was at work.
"I don't think I would have been laughing if I had come home to a crushed cat," Connors said. "Had it hit 25 or 30 feet the other direction, it could have hurt my neighbor. If it hit 25 or 30 in another direction, it could have hit people on the "L" stop."
Where the ice might have fallen from remains a mystery. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Tony Molinaro said that agency officials spoke to Connors to get more information and are trying to determine whether any planes would have been near the his house at that time.
"(His apartment) is near a regular flight pattern but not really right below one," Molinaro said. "It's not like there's a piece of metal that was attached to a plane. A piece of ice -- there's only so much we can do to trace that."
cdrhodes@tribpub.com
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