After Murder of Office Cleaner, a New Light on an Isolated Job

After Murder of Office Cleaner, a New Light on an Isolated Job

By JOSEPH BERGER
Published: July 19, 2009
When other workers in her office building are calling it a day, Elizabeth Magda is just beginning hers. She dumps out their wastebaskets, swipes a rag across their desks, dusts their computers and stocks their bathrooms with toilet paper and paper towels.

As the vast skyscraper empties out and a twilight desolation slowly descends on her floor, Ms. Magda finishes off her night by vacuuming a half acre of carpet, making sure to discard the pizza cartons of the few office workers who stay especially late. By midnight, she is usually the only person left on the floor, yet she does not feel isolated or lonesome, she said, because she knows she will soon be on her way home to Ridgewood, Queens.

“My personality is that I don’t need much people around me,” she said. “I don’t like a factory with a hundred people. It’s my job and I’m doing my job and I’m not thinking I’m lonely or somebody is coming in. You have to do your job.”

Few people pay attention to the workers who clean their offices, as long as the desks are clean in the morning and papers are not tampered with. But every once in a while, something happens to cast a spotlight on their relatively solitary, uncelebrated occupation. On July 11, there was a grisly discovery that did just that: the body of a cleaning woman was found stuffed in an air-conditioning duct in the Lower Manhattan office building where she had worked at night.

The victim, Eridania Rodriguez, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in the early 1990s, was last seen four nights before. The police found her face down, her hands bound behind her back with black and yellow tape, still in her blue custodial uniform. An elevator operator, Joseph Pabon, 25, was arrested on Friday night and charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the killing of Ms. Rodriquez.
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After Murder of Office Cleaner, a New Light on an Isolated Job