A man whose body was found sticking out of a charity bin at a Westfield shopping centre appeared to have broken his neck while trying to scavenge for donated clothing.
The man became trapped headfirst inside the chute on the NSW Central Coast while engaging in a practice known as ‘bin surfing’ or ‘dumpster diving’.
‘We believe he was bin surfing, fell and broke his neck,’ a police source told Daily Mail Australia.
It is understood the man lost his footing on a bicycle he had been using to prop himself up and reach inside the bin for clothes.
A man whose body was found sticking out of a charity bin (above) broke his neck while trying to scavenge for clothes, police believe
Emergency services were called to Westfield Tuggerah on the NSW Central Coast (pictured) about 4.25am on Tuesday
Emergency services were called to Westfield Tuggerah about 4.25am on Tuesday after a passer-by saw legs hanging out of the charity bin.
Officers arrived to find the body of a man wedged inside the chute, with witnesses seeing a bicycle lying on the ground at the base of the bin.
A crime scene was set up at the eastern end of the carpark on Wyong Road.
A Westfield worker told Daily Mail Australia two of his colleagues, who work in a nearby bakery, walked past the bins around 3am as they arrived to work.
In the dark morning light, they noticed a bike lying on the ground beneath the bins but did not notice the protruding body.
‘We were told he stood up on his bike to prop himself up as he tried to get stuff from the bin, but the bike has fallen down and he got trapped,’ said the man, who wished to remain anonymous.
‘It’s very sad. They need to do something to stop people getting into them, like an internal latch or something.’
Police are not treating the man’s death as suspicious.
‘We believe he was bin surfing, fell and broke his neck,’ a police source told Daily Mail Australia
The bodies of two women and a teenage boy were found dead in charity bins in three separate incidents in as many months in 2021.
Mikki O’Shea, 43, died after becoming stuck in a charity bin behind a Gold Coast shopping centre in April 2021.
Three months later, the body of mother-of-one Alarrah Lawrence, 33, was found hanging ‘half-in-half-out’ of a charity bin in Rockingham south of Perth.
Teenager Spencer Benbolt Jnr, 13, was also crushed to death when the skip bin he was sleeping in was emptied into a garbage truck in Port Lincoln, South Australia.
A woman met the same fate inside a charity container in Moonee Ponds in Melbourne’s north-west in July 2020, as did a man in Sydney in 2015.
