By David Moye
Posted: Updated:
A desk clerk at an apartment complex in St. Petersburg, Fla., was fired after tossing a dead body into a dumpster because he thought it was just an April Fools’ day prank.
Ronald Benjamin, 61, first saw the body when he took a smoking break around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, but thought it was fake.
“I’m telling you, I swear to God, the face looked like a rubber mask,” he told TampaBay.com. “If I thought for one instant it was a real person I would have called the police, my manager, everyone I could think of.”
The body that Benjamin thought was a mannequin belonged to a 96-year-old woman who lived at the complex. Sometime in the middle of the night, the unidentified woman committed suicide by jumping off her 16th floor balcony.
Another employee showed up around 6:30 a.m. and noticed the woman’s body, but Benjamin said the body was a bad joke. Benjamin then enlisted two people delivering newspapers to help him put the woman’s body into a Dumpster.
It wasn’t until 8 a.m. that apartment maintenance worker Johnny Williams, 42, found the body in the Dumpster, according to WTSP-TV.