Majorca police have stated that a woman’s death is thought to have been caused by a fall into a trash can.
After vanishing after a night out with friends in Palma on 2 October, Agostina Rubini Medina has been missing for more than two weeks in Majorca.
Officials have said that they believe the student tried to retrieve something from a bin and passed out during the process, with the bin then emptied into a waste lorry where she was crushed to death in the early hours of the following morning.
Spanish authorities expressed their concern at a news conference last Thursday (17 October) that she may have been crushed to death in the truck before her body was burned at the landfill it had been en route to.
They had been tracking her whereabouts that night through her phone signal, and a witness had reported seeing the woman’s purse next to the trash can approximately fifteen minutes before it was emptied into the truck.
Now that they have located the dump, investigators are trying to determine what happened to the student by searching for signs of her DNA.
Deputy Police Chief Fernando Reboyras said: “She was a thin woman who had difficulty consuming alcohol. This was made worse by the medication she was taking.”
He elaborated by saying that investigators think Medina was waiting for a bus at midnight when she retrieved an item that had fallen into the trash can.
A witness who was at the bus stop at 12:12am said they saw the 24-year-old student’s handbag, but did not hear calls for help or screams from within the bin.
At 12:27 in the morning, the garbage workers showed up, collected the trash, and allegedly crushed her to death in their vehicle.
The bin lorry arrived at the landfill site where the woman’s phone went dead at 12:52am.
Investigators have said that it is ‘impossible to survive inside a rubbish truck’ and the 24-year-old would have been dead on the journey to the landfill site.
Officers stated during last week’s press conference that the woman was last seen at 11:57 p.m. on October 2nd, where they thought she was going to wait for a bus, according to the Majorca Daily Bulletin.
Ángel Ruiz, head of the National Police’s Homicide Group, said investigators are certain ‘she never took that bus’.
Skeletal remains have been located and sent for analysis; the student’s phone last signaled at 2:59am, according to the report.