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Nurse Sharks Dumped Outside Overtown Complex

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MIAMI (CBSMiami) -- A shark by your dumpster is certainly is not what you expect to see lurking around your garbage.

So you can imagine how surprised Cynthia Primous was when she learned the underwater predator was outside her Overtown apartment on NW 1st Place.

"They told me that, 'Grandma, there's a shark by the garbage pale.' So I thought my granddaughter was playing," she said.

Nevertheless, she went out to have a look. Primous didn't find just one shark but two. One of the nurse sharks was on the ground in front of a dumpster, a second one was in the dumpster.

"My granddaughter informed me that a car stopped by the apartment and a guy proceeded to throw a large bag in the garbage and that's when the shark fell out the bag. He also threw one in the garbage," said Primous.

Charter Boat Captain and well-known shark fisherman "Mark the Shark" calls what happened wasteful and foolish.

"That's very bizarre. Somebody obviously caught those two animals and had no use for them and just threw them in the dumpster," he said. "Nurse sharks are harmless, they'll come up to you while you're diving, you can pet them, you can hand feed them, there's no reason to kill a nurse shark, not at all."

This isn't the first time we've had a shark dumped in the area. Eight years ago a couple of guys left a nurse shark in the road after dragging it around all day trying to sell it to restaurants. There were, of course, no takers. In this latest case, garbage men hauled the carcasses away.

Cynthia hopes to never see something like this again.

"I just hope that nobody don't think that just because this is a poor neighborhood, and a predominately black neighborhood, that they can just come and dump anything in our garbage pale," she said.

Primous' neighbors said they didn't see the man who dumped the sharks and had no idea why he'd pick their dumpster.

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