WESTFIELD – A city homeless man who found a warm place to sleep Monday night got a rude awakening in the morning when he was dumped into a recycling truck.
An emergency dispatcher reports he took a 4:49 a.m. call Tuesday from a panicked man working for a trash disposal company who reported that after he dumped a container into his truck an Asian male party jumped out of his truck and fled toward the east.
The caller told the dispatcher that when he was lifting the cardboard recycling container at a Main Street donut store to dump it into his truck he heard someone screaming but “did not think anything of it.”
Sgt. Michael Kane was the first officer to arrive and reports that he looked for the man (described as a “Korean guy”) on Route 20 from the West Springfield line to the donut shop without finding him but the other responding officers, Matthew Preuss and Matthew Schultze, found the man.
Preuss reports that the man, a homeless person well-known to many of the city’s officers, told him that he had too many drinks the night before and, while trying to find a way to keep warm, decided to sleep in the cardboard recycling container.
He was awakened when the dump truck operator lifted the container and dumped the contents, which included the man, into his truck.
The startled homeless man jumped out of the truck but immediately jumped back in to recover his bag of possessions.
After again exiting the bin, the man then ran east on Main Street.
Preuss reports that he advised the man not to sleep in refuse containers in the future and the man “agreed that it was not a good idea” before leaving the area.
