Has anyone ever discovered a body?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been kind of coccooning lately, sitting and knitting while the skies turn gray. Which means of course I’m watching a lot of TV. I have like 19,438 cable channels, most of which show one of the* Law & Order* franchises for large chunks of the day. These shows have obviously been on for 40 or 50 years, because there seems to be a bottomless vat of episodes I’ve never seen. And every single one of them begins, of course, with two chicks walking along gossiping and–what the?!–stumbling over a dead prositute.

Obviously this happens several times a day in the L&O world. Has such a thing ever happened to anyone here?

2

Why, I just found a dead prostitute on thursday!
No, just kidding. I’ve seen dead bodies, but I’ve never stumbled across a strange one before.

3

I can think of a few dead ones I’d like to stumble across…

4

My dad once took me with him to pronounce a patient dead. When I was 10.

That was kind of freaky.

5

Old lady in a hedge near my school. I was either eleven or twelve.

6

Yeah, my favorites are the ones with Jerry Orbach as a 19-year-old rookie patrolman driving around with Marty Milner in a '55 Ford Fairlane prowl car with spotlights. But they never show those. :dubious:

Larry, please tell me you ran like hell to the nearest adult, who called the proper authorities.

7

Found one before it was dead. :eek:

When I was working night security when I was a student, I found an unconscious woman in a car. No response, so I got campus police. Turns out that she was trying to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills but I found her first.

8

Yah! Way to go TP!

It is always a good feeling to save a life.

9

When I was around 10 years old, my family and I were beach camping near Ensenada, BC, Mexico. One early morning, my sister and I were walking from out tent site over to some large rocks from where our father was fishing. On the way, we noticed something floating in the water and getting closer to the sand. It was the body of a young-looking female. She seemed unconscious, bloated, purplish skin color, wearing jeans and what seemed to be a tight top. We ran to my father and he called the authorities. They arrived within about 15 minutes and administered some type of CPR care. She was taken to the nearest hospital. My father told us later that day that she died.

10

I have.

I was living in an apartment building and had been smelling something off in my place for a day or two, so I devoted an entire Saturday to intensive cleaning efforts in order to be rid of it. I ran across my super just as I was finishing up carting the trash to the curb but (much to my personal irritation) still had a weird smell going on. Thinking it was for sure a rat or something dead in the walls, I took her into my place so she could smell it herself.

She agreed there was definitely something goin on (because my apartment was now spotless), and so, in the spirit of adventurous exploration, we chugged upstairs to see if my upstairs neighbor had the same problem. So we knocked and knocked and nobody answered. The super started getting really annoyed because she just knew he was in there. He was an older guy, didn’t get out much, and had faithfully kept the same schedule for 30-odd years.

After a while, muttering in Russian, she got her keys and unlocked his door. We opened it up and out came the stench.

She got hysterical, so I sent her down to call 911 and I went to see if he was okay.

Not so much.

Turns out he’d had a heart attack somewhere between 5 and 7 days before we opened the door up.

Then I got to deal with the police officers. The super was an older lady who’d immigrated from Russia in the bad old days pre-Glasnost and had a really difficult time interacting with anyone in uniform. She lost her English, and all but cowered every time one of them even looked at her. The building manager’s office and the landlord couldn’t be arsed to send over a representative, though.

The worst part was actually dealing with the younger of the two cops who responded - it was his first dead body and he apparently decided that it just had to be a murder. Therefore, following the Perry Mason school of criminal investigation, the one who found the body must be guilty. His partner did a lot of covert eye-rolling at this guy. He was young though, so mostly he was just a pain in the ass.

11

I thought I did, when I was in the 6th grade. My cousin and I were out riding our bikes, and found a ‘body’ in the weeds behind a small Mom & Pop restaurant. We tried talking to him, tossed a few pebbles , then got on our bikes and rode like hell home. We convinced my mom we had found a dead man, and she drove us back over, where we found the ‘body’ sitting up on the back steps in a drunken stupor. :smack:

When I was 9, my grandmother had a heart attack and died when we were here alone.

In May of this year, I found my father dead in his bed. :frowning:

12

When you are 11 that is always step two. Step one is : Poke it with a stick.

13

Last winter I saw a corpse floating down the river that runs behind my house. I used binoculars to make sure.

14

Your OP brings to mind an observation I have made about L&O world.

Though not at the moment, for most of my life I worked in the service industry, cocktail waitress, bar maid, snooty restaurant server, bartender, caterer to the snobs, etc., etc. That’s right 20 plus years. And in all that time, never once, did I, or anyone else I worked with in any of numerous establishments ever have a cop ask, “Was this guy in here last night?”, “You recognize this guy?”, “What time did they leave?”.

In L&O world servers are the key to locating everyone. Every episode. It’s very believable, I didn’t notice at all for a really embarassingly long time myself. Now it’s so glaring I can hardly watch the show any more.

I have seen the body of someone who died in their bed.
(Apology for the hijack!) :smack:

15

Does a skeleton count?

About 12 years ago I was in college and we spring breaked down in Pryor, Oklahoma. My roomie was from there and it was…well… kinda boring. Nonetheless, we were hunting for arrowheads along the beach of Lake Hudson and I came across what looked to be a bowl and called my friends over. After some dusting and moving of rocks, we found that it wasn’t a bowl but the back of someone’s skull. We soon unearthed most of the rib cage and some more bones. At that point, we decided to stop our little archaeological adventure and head back home (which was a couple blocks away). About 5 years prior to that, OU (or was it OSU, I can’t remember) had done a dig there and found a large number of Cherokee skeletons in what was thought to have been either a suicide pact or a very large accident and they must have just missed the one I found.

16

I found a body floating in the Mississippi. At the end of Summit Avenue in Saint Paul, MN. It was a warm February day, a Friday the 13th, and winter was hinting that it was going to give away to spring soon, and the Thermometer hit past 50 for the first time in months. His name was Dennis (But I will always know him as ‘Bob’, because that’s what he was doing) and he had jumped off a bridge 4 months earlier. The cold and mighty Miss refused to warm his body to the point that gasses could build up until that day.

Another time I was one of the first. That rather unpleasant story can be found here.

17

A couple of years ago, I failed to find a body.

I was living in a house which had been converted into 5 flats, two on the ground floor, two (including mine) on the first and one in the attic. An oldish (in his 50s?), respectable-hippy type bloke lived on his own on the ground floor but I didn’t have much contact with him except exchanging the odd word if we met coming in or going out. A few months previously, he told me that had been pretty ill hospital for a while. One day as I got home from work there was an ambulance parked outside and a paramedic just coming out of the house. “Do you live here?” she asked, “Just to let you know that the man in flat 1 is dead.”

It turned out he’d actually been dead for quite a while. As it happens, there had been a bit of a funny smell hanging around the house for a few days but I attributed it to the damp in the basement. How was I - or anyone else in the house - supposed to know what a decomposing human body smells like? But, having smelt it once, I’ll know what to do the next time!

18

I didn’t actually find one, but I drove passed one in Tucson. My first reaction was nonchalant. “Oh look honey. there’s a dead guy in the ditch.” Followed a half a second later by “Dear God. Oh shit. Christ almighty, there’s – I swear, someone by the side of the road who looks, I don’t know, not so good…*” [police sirens]

Next day I scanned the paper and found about 5 dead guys in Tucson and none of them was my guy. I still don’t know what happened to him.

*It’s possible that he was just injured, but very very unlikely.

19

No, but I thought I did once.

When I was 10, my friend Phil and I were hiking near the river. Underneath the bridge, from a distance of about 20-30 feet, we spotted a man’s prone body. We literally ran the whole way to the police.

They took us very seriously, and quickly got a squad car ready. (We felt like bigshots, riding in the back seat – although Phil nervously noted, “Everyone’s looking at us”).

We got to the river, and as we got out of the car about fifty feet from the body, one cop noted that if he was dead, it must be recent, because he couldn’t smell anything.

We drew closer, and one of the cops recognized him: “Melvin Pyle”.

For the first time, we could see several bottles of booze to his right, several empties to his left, and one half-filled one between his legs.

“Yeah, he’s dead”, said a cop. “Dead drunk.”

One cop splashed some booze from the open bottle on his face, eliciting an incoherent response from old Melvin.

“He’s all right”.

“Might as well leave him alone-- he’s better off down here than causing trouble up in town”.

They thanked us, and drove away.

Yes, I basically grew up in Mayberry.

20

I’ve seen dead animals. Never a dead human. I suppose I should be grateful…