A 21-year-old  Vancouver man growled while he evaded police for more than an hour by crawling through the ceiling space of a Macy’s department store late last month, court records allege.

Gabriel Hideo is accused of first-degree burglary and first-degree mischief in the odd incident, which happened around 4 p.m. on Sept. 20 at the Vancouver Mall.

Store staff called police to report that someone was crawling around in the ceiling, and when officers arrived they found that Hideo had damaged ceiling tiles and knocked some of them out of the ceiling entirely, court records allege.

Staff placed a tall ladder near where Hideo was crawling, and a police officer scaled the ladder and could hear the man rustling around, court records state.

Eventually enough ceiling tiles fell away for officers to see Hideo, who was growling and making “incoherent noises as if he were speaking in tongues,” an officer later reported, according to court records.

Despite the officers’ pleas to come down, Hideo continued to move along the ceiling’s sprinkler pipe system, eventually coming to a stop on a vent pipe, court records allege.

Police put a ladder and a mattress under him and tried to talk him down, and for a moment he set a foot on the ladder and appeared ready to return to the ground before apparently changing his mind.

Officers pulled the ladder out from under him before he could, and he tumbled from the ceiling space onto the mattress, court records show.

Officers arrested him and found a large, fixed-blade knife, which they confiscated before emergency responders took him to a hospital, court records say.

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