At first, Xia Yang didn't believe his wife's urgent calls. But when he looked out the sliding-screen door of his third-floor apartment in Little Canada, his balcony was gone. So were the four friends he'd left talking there minutes earlier.

"I ran and looked out my balcony and it was gone," said Yang, 27, who had left to say goodbye to some other friends about 7:20 p.m. Friday.

The four men who'd been on the balcony lay on the ground three floors below, three of them injured. The three, who were bruised and scratched and broke some bones, were treated at Regions Hospital in St. Paul and released that night, said one of them, Bee Vang, 18.

Vang, who was resting at his St. Paul home Saturday with broken ribs and a sore shoulder, said he was talking to three pals on the balcony when they heard a loud crack.

"Everything happened so fast," he said. "The whole thing just went down. All of a sudden I was on the ground."

His stomach and face hit the lawn. The wind was knocked out of him for a few minutes and he was confused at first, unsure of what had happened.

Yang said that when he and his wife moved into the Montreal Courts apartment building about four months ago, he noticed that his and other balconies appeared to be in poor shape. By mid-Saturday, a maintenance man came and boarded up his balcony door, he said, but he hadn't heard anything from the complex's managers.

A call to Goldmark Property Management, which runs the complex, was referred to corporate offices, which didn't return a phone message Saturday.

Yang said that tenants in the apartment two floors below him run a day-care service and that children often play in the yard below his unit in the evenings.

Fortunately, no kids were there Friday night, said Yang.

"I was surprised nobody was really, really injured," he said. "I was one of the lucky ones."

Jim Adams • 612-673-7658