Tamara Seibert was taking Vado, her 110-pound Rottweiler, and Tessa, a friend's pitbull, from the 11th floor to the parking garage at her Toronto condo building when the unthinkable happened on March 2.
The elevator began descending and Vado suddenly flew to the elevator's ceiling after his leash became stuck in the doors.
In a frightening surveillance video, the dog can be seen pawing at the doors with his hind legs as his owner frantically tries to stop the car by pushing the emergency button.
When the button only sounded the alarm, she ran back to Vado and tried to release him from his collar, The Toronto Sun reported.
"I thought I was going to watch him die," she told the newspaper.
Eventually Vado's nylon leash snapped, released the dog and dropped him to the floor. Seibert mangled her hands and broke two fingers trying to set him free.
The 25-year-old Ryerson University student posted the video of the incident to her Facebook account on Tuesday, where it drew over 57,000 shares. The video was later uploaded to YouTube.
Seibert called the incident "one of the most traumatic experiences" of my life in a Facebook post, saying she shared the video to show people "how fast something so simple can go horribly wrong."
She said in a separate post that situations like this are more common than she thought: a California woman told her about a seven-year-old girl who died after her dress was stuck in an elevator.
A similar incident saw a Chicago bulldog avoid tragedy when an elevator door closed on his leash in January 2012. Surveillance footage showed the dog being dragged up the door swiftly before falling back down and somehow landing on his feet.
The dog was OK but his owner suffered a broken wrist.
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