N.Y.C. Apartment Residents Detail 'Deafening Crash' as Kitchen Collapses at 5 a.m. (Exclusive)

On Sunday, April 27, Ben Jardine was abruptly awakened at 5:15 a.m. by a deafening crash.

Jardine, a 28-year-old comedian residing in a four-unit townhouse building in Brooklyn Heights with his two roommates Liz Butler, 30, and Christine Covode, 26, immediately feared someone had broken into their home.

Upon entering the kitchen and seeing the cabinets scattered across the floor, he recalls in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE shouting, "What the f---."

"It was just so surreal to see all of that happen," he says, describing the moment when every cabinet detached from the walls, crashing down.

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Covode, who works as a video editor, stumbled upon the chaos right after Jardine. She was awakened by the noise while sleeping next to her boyfriend, joking, "We leapt hilariously into each other's arms."

"It sounded like a car was hitting our building," adds Covode, who moved into the apartment with her two roommates in November 2023.

Butler, another comedian, was the last to learn about the kitchen disaster as Jardine rushed into her room, telling her, "The kitchen is on the floor."

When Butler entered the kitchen for the first time after hearing the news, she was in tears.

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"The cherished, most breakable pieces in the home are in those cabinets. We have a few survivors, like some plates, but really all our mugs are gone," she says. "A lot of bowls, a lot of precious faces. All the glassware is shattered, the vessels of the home are destroyed."

After the incident, Covode shared a video of the aftermath on social media, with the TikTok quickly gaining over 2 million views and prompting others to share similar experiences.

The roommates also informed their downstairs neighbors about the incident and encouraged them to check their own cabinets, discovering that theirs were also leaning off the wall.

"Sometimes the only way to cope with that is to try to make light of it," Jardine says. "It's like we've got to make some lemonade. There are a lot of lemons right now."

The friends add that they've also started to make a list of all the items and their prices that were damaged in the crash. So far, it's up to over $2,000, they say.

"We love this area so much. It's a dream to be here," Covode shares. "The apartment is gorgeous. That's why it was such a shock. That was the last thing we expected to happen on a Sunday morning."

Covode adds, "If this had happened an hour later, Ben would've been making coffee. Someone could have been seriously injured or killed."

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