Student falls 20 feet, fractures skull

Sophomore Joel Dinin suffered fractures to his head and left knee as well as head lacerations after an accidental 20-foot jump into a maintenance well at Collins Living Learning Center.\nDinin said he and a friend were walking back to Collins Edmonson at about 1 a.m. Friday. They walked up the stairs to the main entrance, and he playfully jumped over the side railing, thinking he would land a few feet below.\n"I jumped over the railing, thinking that when I got over the other side my feet would land on something," Dinin said. "They didn't, and I lost my grip and I fell.\n"I didn't know the stairs were really high up."\nInstead of landing just beneath the railing, he fell 20 feet onto the concrete floor.\n"He was out there and they were joking around, and he went to jump over this railing thinking he would land on the same level he had left from, when in fact he dropped 20 feet onto a concrete surface," said IU Police Department Lt. Jerry Minger. \nDinin said he blacked out, and when he woke up he was in the well and people were holding his head up.\n"I got to normal levels of consciousness pretty darn quickly, and I started screaming."\nMinger said officers concluded that no drugs or alcohol were involved in the accident.\nAn ambulance transported Dinin to Bloomington Hospital.