April Fools Day can be hilarious, and sometimes it can get you fired. The desk clerk at a St. Petersburg Florida retirement complex thought somebody was playing a prank when he went outside for a cigarette at 4:30 a.m. on April 1st, then scoped what appeared to be a mannequin sprawled in the parking lot. Unamused, he went back inside without thinking more about it. Two hours later, another staff member from the retirement home alerted him to the spectacle in the parking lot, but he told her it was just a mannequin.
When the paperboy arrived with his mom to drop off the local broadsheet, the clerk asked the boy to help him lift the thing into the dumpster. The boy did and the clerk considered the matter dealt with.
What the clerk didn't know was that a 96 year old woman on the 16th floor wrote a suicide note the night before, opened her window, and jumped out. By the time they attempted to move her, rigor mortis had caused her to become as stiff as a mannequin. A maintenance worker who went to the dumpster around 8 a.m. spotted her body and realized it was a person. Police aren't charging the clerk, but he did lose his job at the apartment complex.
