Aurora Man Trapped Inside of Garbage Truck, Found Injured but Alive

An Aurora trash collector had barely started his pickups on February 2 when he heard a strange noise coming from the back of the garbage truck: moaning.

Mixed in with the loads of trash was a middle-aged man trapped inside the back of the truck, according to Aurora Fire Rescue. Firefighters were called to the scene just after 5 a.m. to rescue the man, who was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Aurora officials say they don't know how long the man was inside of the truck or how he got in — he could have been inside a dumpster that was emptied into the truck, been accidentally pulled inside when the truck picked up a garbage can, or been inside the truck before it started collecting that morning.

"The driver just started his route; he had only made a few pickups," says Shannon Hardi, spokesperson for Aurora Fire Rescue. "Who knows when that person entered the trash truck?"

Getting stuck in trash trucks is a surprisingly common phenomenon throughout the country.

Just this week, a sixty-year-old New Hampshire woman fell into a dumpster and was loaded into a garbage truck, where she was critically injured after the truck compacted the trash on top of her four times. On January 9, a Mississippi man collecting cardboard from a dumpster broke his leg and hip when he was dropped into a garbage truck. That same day, a Florida resident was launched into a garbage truck by the automatic lift, getting trapped inside unbeknownst to the truck driver.

While these most recent victims escaped the trucks with their lives, not everyone is so lucky. In 2022, a 42-year-old Louisiana man was crushed to death by the compactor inside of a garbage truck; he had been sleeping in a dumpster that was emptied into the truck, authorities said. A thirty-year-old dumpster diver in North Carolina was killed in a similar way in 2020, and her body was discovered at a landfill.

Hardi could not confirm whether the Aurora garbage truck's compactor was turned on while the man was inside, but he says the truck driver said "the storage space for waste was relatively empty due to the fact that he just started his route."

The garbage truck belonged to Republic Services, one of the eight residential trash collection companies licensed with the City of Aurora. "Our driver acted swiftly to secure the vehicle so that the Aurora Fire Department could assist the individual," says a Republic spokesperson.

Firefighters responded to the incident in the Fitzsimons neighborhood, near the intersection of North Wheeling Street and East 19th Place; it's uncertain where the man became trapped.