Tourist from Texas is Twitter sensation ... after becoming locked in book store

David Willis had been browsing in Waterstone’s in Trafalgar Square on Thursday night, but went downstairs shortly after 9pm to find the lights out and the shop deserted.

Despite calls to the shop’s security and police, he spent two hours trapped inside the darkened store – and was only rescued when he used Twitter to alert the world to his predicament.

Mr Willis, from Texas in the United States, said: “I’m very tired, I did not sleep much last night but it feels good to be free.”

He said he had popped in to the bookshop just before 9pm, not realising it was about to close, and strolled past employees as he went upstairs to sit down and use the internet.

Around 15 minutes later he got up to leave, but when he walked downstairs he found it was “completely dark and the door locked”.

He added: “Right when I came downstairs I saw I had been locked in and I went to the door, tried to open it, the alarm went off. The alarm sounded in Trafalgar Square for probably 20 or 25 minutes.

“The phone rang after about ten minutes or so. It was a security guard and I talked to him and I thought ‘I’ll be out of here in a few minutes’. And a little more and a little more time went by.

“I finally said I’m going to talk to the police, I talked to them, and I thought I would get out from the police very soon. Then I just kept waiting and waiting, so eventually I went to social media.”

He posted a picture of himself behind shutters inside the darkened store with the message: “This is me locked inside a Waterstones bookstore in London.

When he was finally released, he wrote: “I’m free.”