Former BYU safety learns caution on 3-day weekends like this

Got one of those three-day weekends today because of the President’s Day holiday?

Well here’s a story of one of those three-day weekends that could have turned into a disaster for former BYU safety Corby Hodgkiss. He told this story on Sunday in church after he was announced as the new Elder’s Quorum president in a ward (BYU 146th Ward) in which my son-in-law attends.

When playing at BYU he had a job working as a janitor in the court buildings that service Provo and Orem cities. One of his jobs was to clean the holding cell in which inmates are placed while they await hearing and appearances in court.

On a Saturday morning, Corby was doing his routine with a broom and mop. He got to the holding cell and hung up a few of his tools including the keys on a wall, took his mop and bucket and entered one of the holding cells. He placed the bucket in the doorway to prevent it from closing. Well, it did close. And it did so with such force, due to weight or springs that it squeezed the bucket out of place and slammed shut.

It hit Corby like a ton of bricks. He couldn’t get out. It was a holiday weekend. The courts were closed. Nobody was in the building. This was Saturday morning. Sunday would come and go and then Monday. Nobody would be there until Tuesday morning with work resumed and he was stuck. What could he do? What would he eat or drink? He felt a great sense of fear and panic. He tried to use the mop and reach over to where he’d put the keys put that didn’t work. He started banging on the window with the mop so he could yell out for help but after a while he realized it was not going to break, after all, this was a jail cell and the window was made of Plexiglas and it was not going to be destroyed.

Corby knelt down and said a prayer. Then he did his job, he cleaned up the cell. He then took a nap. Four hours had elapsed since his captivity. He woke from his short nap and said another prayer. Corby then started banging the mop on the cell door, trying to make noise in case somebody was inside our outside. No luck.

Then he heard a noise. Somebody was in the building. He started banging the mop against the door and yelling. Finally, somebody came. It was a judge who just happened to come in that Saturday to get some work done. Corby had to convince the judge he wastn’ a prisoner, that he was just the janitor and he needed out. They both had a good laugh about it and the judge let Corby out.

Said the judge, “I don’t know why I came down here. I always spend Saturday at home with the wife and kids, but for some reason I felt I needed to come down here to the courthouse and do some work in the office, so I left the house and came down here.”

Corby told the story Sunday, describing the feeling of panic he had, comparing it to how he felt when he got his new church calling.