Justin Casquejo, a New Jersey teen, loves to climb things.
His latest climb took him to the top of 1 World Trade Center, the tallest building in New York City.
A photo he snapped from the top sent to friends and posted on Twitter shows the view from there.
The 16-year-old has also posted other photos of his climbs, including one from atop a crane in Hoboken, New Jersey.
You can see One World Trade Center in the photo in the distance.
Casquejo is described by a friend as an adventure-seeker who loves to climb precarious places.
He spent about two hours early Sunday atop One WTC.
He apparently just wanted bragging rights and perhaps some photos, but the alleged escapade stirred what-ifs about the notion of someone with a more sinister agenda infiltrating the nation’s tallest skyscraper.
“Obviously, it was shocking and troubling,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, “and I don’t know how possibly it could have happened.”
Joe Dunne, security chief of the bistate Port Authority that has jurisdiction over the building, said officials “take security and these types of infractions very seriously.”
Casquejo was being held without bail after an arraignment Monday on criminal trespassing. His lawyer, Pamela Griffith, declined to comment. Nobody answered the door Thursday at his Weehawken, N.J., home; an effort to reach him through someone who answered a possible phone number for him wasn’t immediately successful.
Pedestrians in front of 1 WTC in a file photo. (AP Photo)
Casquejo told police he simply walked around the construction site and found a way through the scaffolding around 4 a.m., according to a court complaint. He squeezed through a one-foot opening in a fence, said Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police. The authority owns the site.
The court complaint quotes Casquejo saying that he climbed to the sixth floor, rode an elevator to the 88th and took the stairs to the 104th. There, he got past an inattentive security guard, a private contractor employee who has since been fired, Pentangelo said.
Casquejo told police, “I went to the rooftop and climbed the ladder all the way to the antenna,” according to the complaint.
WABC-TV reported that he took pictures from the top of the building; authorities said they were still trying to determine the teen’s motive. He was arrested on the site, and his camera and cellphone were seized after authorities obtained a search warrant, Pentangelo said.
Patrick Flores, an 18-year-old neighbor who grew up with Casquejo, described the teen as “a really good kid” who has always been highly interested in adventure.
“He was always the one climbing the cliffs, doing something stupid,” Flores said, referring to the cliffs on which Weehawken sits, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, with clear views of the World Trade Center and the rest of the Manhattan skyline. “But that was him — that was his life.”
“I’ve seen him fall and hit his head and get up and walk away like it was nothing,” he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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