Suicide victim’s body mistaken as April Fools’ Day prank, thrown in trash

In St. Petersburg, Florida an elderly woman’s dead body spent hours in a trash bin after a front desk clerk mistook her corpse for an April Fools’ Day prank.

The unidentified 96-year-old leaped to her death from the balcony of her 16th floor apartment at an independent living facility she had called home for the last 20 years.

Ronald Benjamin, who works as a clerk at the Peterborough Apartments (seen above), found the body during a smoke break at around 4:30 am yesterday but believed it to be a prank – so he left it laying in the parking lot.

Another clerk, Rose Anne Beavers, arrived at 6 am to relieve Benjamin. Beavers believed it was a real body but after conferring with a third employee they decided it was not real and that the blood underneath the corpse was red paint. After getting help from a couple delivering newspapers, the group lifted the body up and tossed it into the bin.

A couple of hours later Beavers told a maintenance worker named Johnny Williams about the situation. He followed up and after observing the corpse decided without question that it was very much real. At this point someone called the police to the scene.

Police spokesman Mike Puetz told TBO that when investigators searched the woman’s apartment a suicide note was found as well as a stool she had used to elevate herself over the balcony wall.