14 DAY TRIAL // A bizarre incident happened in St. Petersburg, Florida, on Wednesday morning, when an employee at an apartment block mistook a dead woman's body for a mannequin and threw it into a dumpster.
When a desk clerk working an overnight shift at the Petersborough Apartments for Seniors on 4th Avenue North went out for a smoke break at around 4:30 a.m., on Wednesday morning, he found a body lying in the parking lot and thought someone was playing an April Fools’ Day prank on him.
That is why the man initially ignored the corpse and calmly returned to work. However, two hours later, the clerk solicited the help of a couple who were delivering newspapers to put the body into a dumpster, after another employee arrived and alerted him to the body.
But as it turns out, the body was not a mannequin, as the 61-year-old employee had thought, but the corpse of an elderly suicide victim. Investigators revealed that a 96-year-old woman took her own life by jumping to her death from the 16th floor of the building, and her body ended up in the trash after the clerk mistook it for a prank.
A maintenance worker discovered the corpse and brought the unfortunate error to light later that morning.
“His first reaction to this was that it was an April Fools prank. [...] There were actually four separate people that came across this woman and all were apparently fooled to the point where they at least believed that what they were dealing with was not human remains,” St. Petersburg Police Department spokesman Mike Puetz explained, according to the Independent.
The employee who made the initial mistake was fired but will not face charges, local police said. Authorities didn't disclose the identity of the woman, but they said that a suicide note was found in her 16th story apartment.
Residents of the apartment complex, who know who the woman is, were shocked by the news and said she was a lovely person.
“I was absolutely devastated. She was such a wonderful, upbeat, polite, gentle, intellectual woman,” said Nancy Sanborn, the librarian working at the complex.
Although it may seem unbelievable that someone could mistake a human body for a mannequin, police said that, due to the time of day the body was first spotted, darkness could be blamed for the clerk's confusion.
“It’s one of those crazy circumstances that probably wouldn’t replicate itself in a hundred years,” Puetz commented.