A Florida woman was reportedly crushed to death by a friend’s homemade elevator.
The Tampa Bay Times reports that Margaret Elizabeth Harrison, 66, went to her friend’s Weeki Wachee home early Tuesday and but didn’t show up for more than an hour after Jean Blair sent an outside elevator to the building’s first floor in anticipation of Harrison’s arrival.
"I thought, oh, good, she made it," Frank Jorr, Harrison’s boyfriend, told the newspaper on Thursday.
Deputies said Jorr found Harrison underneath an elevator constructed by Blair’s husband using a forklift, wood and welded metal. Under Florida law, lifts and other conveyances in private homes do not require certificates of operation or inspections, the newspaper reports, and no citations were issued. Officials, however, did shut down the device.
Officials pronounced Harrison, an Alabama native, dead at the scene.
"I knew as soon as I saw her," Jorr said. "She was blue already."
The death has been ruled an accident.
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