An Australian man has told how he was almost crushed to death after waking up in a garbage-compactor truck following a night out at the pub.
Wayne Griffin (40) said he cannot remember how he ended up in the compactor in Perth, Western Australia, but police said closed-circuit television footage showed three men dumping the retail manager in an industrial bin, which was then emptied into the truck.
Griffin said his first memory of the incident earlier this month was when shards of rubbish began to pierce his body as the compactor’s hydraulic crusher bore down on him.
”The pressures just pushed my shoulders together to the point where it broke my arm and my ribs and my eyes were almost out of their sockets,” he told Channel Seven television late Wednesday.
”I’d just gone into this automatic save-myself mode, not knowing where I was but knowing that I was in a dangerous position.”
Griffin said he began frantically banging on the sides of the truck to get the attention of the driver, who had left his cab to replace a lid on a bin.
”At first he thought the banging was rats or something, but it was too loud for it to be rats. So he obviously thought it was someone in there,” Griffin said.
”If he hadn’t got out to go and put the lid on the bin, he wouldn’t have heard me.”
Griffin remains in hospital following his ordeal on September 17 and said he still feels traumatised.
”I’m having nightmares ever since,” he said. ”I’ve had dreams of police going to my parents and saying your son’s dead, we found him at the tip — I feel like I’ve died, even though I haven’t.”
Griffin said he believes his drinks were spiked at the pub and the men who put him in the rubbish bin did it as a prank after stealing his wallet.
Police said they are searching for the three men. — Sapa-AFP