A reporter in Paris captured a heartwarming moment when he found himself trapped at the top of the Eiffel Tower with a couple he had just met.
When Associated Press reporter Pat Eaton-Robb from Connecticut went on vacation to France, he didn’t expect that he would become stranded at the summit of the famous tourist attraction due to someone climbing up the tower. He also didn’t expect to witness a random couple deciding to get married amid the chaos.
As AP reported Thursday, Amir Khan, from Washington, D.C., had been planning to propose to his girlfriend Kat Warren later that night with a romantic dinner on the River Seine and a walk in a more secluded garden. However, these plans were foiled when police arrested a man climbing up the Eiffel Tower, leaving the couple, the reporter, and other visitors temporarily stranded.
Eaton-Robb decided to begin reporting the story in real time, capturing Khan’s spur-of-the-moment romantic decision.
“I figured we might be here longer than I imagined,” Khan told the AP reporter, per ABC News. “So I didn’t want to miss dinner and she always wanted to be proposed to on or under the Eiffel Tower. So I figured, ‘This is it, this is the moment.’”
Warren answered with a “yes.”
“He had a pretty good chance of me saying ‘Yes’ all along,” she said, laughing.
If she had declined, “somebody else would be climbing the Eiffel Tower today possibly,” the new fiancée joked.
The unauthorized climber was eventually found between the tower’s second and third floors, said Eiffel Tower communications director Alice Beunardeau.
According to the news agency, “a specialist team of climbing firefighters led the man down and police arrested him.”
Beunardeau said the man was apparently carrying a banner referencing the American pop-star Billie Eilish.
“I think it was ‘Free Billie Eilish,'” she said. “I’m not certain of that at this moment but on the face of it, that was the message.”
