I was present when a dead body was found in the weeds in a duffle bag in north Philly.
Before that I was sitting in my truck waiting for the building owner so I could get inside. Turns out I was sitting a few feet from the body. What’s weird is that a patrol car passed me as I sat there waiting but then after the body was found let me leave the scene without even questioning me.
I guess I don’t look like the type.
Yup. (No adequately-sized sticks handy.)
I… ain’t found no boooody
I would though highly recommend Jon Krakauer’s book Into The Wild, the reconstruction of the events leading to the demise of a young man found dead in an abandoned bus in the wilds of Alaska. It really makes you think about the story behind each passing and is an absolutely compelling read.
And it highlights the importance of a good fieldguide to edible roots.
I did once about 30 years ago. I went out to my car after work and found a dead guy between my car and my boss’s car. I knew immediately that he was dead because it was summer in North Carolina and he was already pretty icky, with bugs and stuff.
Plus, the instant I saw the body I remembered the gunshot we’d heard earlier that day. Gunshots were far from rare in that neighborhood; for one thing there was a hardware store up the street that sold guns, and they often allowed “test shots”. Really. So no one thought anything of the gunshot at the time. Fortunately it allowed the police to pin down the time of death and then piece together what had happened.
Turns out the dead guy had been shot while climbing in a girl’s bedroom window, apparently intending to swipe her TV. She shot him, he left her side yard but only got a few yards before he died next to my VW bug.
Ironically, during the furor of police, fire, FBI (the guy died on the property of a federally-insured bank) coroner’s personnel and what have you, the girl’s TV was stolen.
[hijack] NurseCarmen, what was the outcome of all that? Did you get sued? Did the jerkface get in trouble? [/hijack]
Thankfully sanity prevailed on the suit front, they had no case. Sadly, the resort owners had to spend money on lawyers that they otherwise would not have, so they still got dinged.
No one was punished beyond the confiscation of a snowmobile.
In the early 70’s I was stationed at a small Navy base in southern MS. The civilian
base investigator decided to take advantage of an early retirement offer and I was
chosen to replace him until another civilian could be hired. One eve. I had duty as
OOD and was making my rounds in the duty p/u when I rec. a radio call to a
domestic dispute in base housing.
When I arrived I found a young man sitting on the front steps and doubled over
holding his stomach. He said he had shot himself. I radioed for an ambulance and
returned to the house where his wife and her mother were standing in the doorway. I
asked them what had happened and the young man replied very adamantly, even
though he was obviously in great pain, repeating that he had shot himself. The women
reacted somewhat strangely to this. I asked them where the gun was and they led me
to the bedroom where there was a small semi auto pistol laying on the bed. Both
women were reluctant to give me any details, they seemed confused.
The ambulance arrived and took the man to to local civilian E.R. and the women
followed in their car. I sealed the house and contacted the FBI. They had jurisdiction
over felony crimes on military property. When the agent arrived he took my
statement and assumed the investigation. The young man died during the night and I
later learned that the death was ruled an accidental shooting. The FBI never contacted me again.
I’m almost certain that his wife shot him and when the mother heard his statement she
convinced her daughter to go along w/ the story. I suggested this in my statement, but
the fact was that I heard him say, at least twice, that he had shot himself. I’ll never
know for sure.
I have found one, and my friend/landlord has found three. Two of the three bodies he found were together but I guess it still counts as three “findings”
Mine was a lady in an apartment complex I worked in. It was sort of an assisted living place, but not neccasarily for elderly. This woman was only 40-ish, very spry and no apparent health problems. I went to her apartment one morning to remind her it was time for her meds and she was face down on the floor, stiff and grey.
My landlord runs a rural paper route so he is out in the wee hours on country roads every morning. The first body he found was hanging in a tree. He said he had seen something strange for several weeks dangling from a tree across from a field he drove by each night. One day curiosity got the best of him so he parked and walked out there. The guy had been hanging there awhile because he was not much more than bones with clothes on at that point.
The other two bodies he found were a murder suicide. As he was delivering a paper to a regular customer he saw the male of the couple lying in the driveway. Thinking the man had a heart attack he got out, approached him and saw that he had been shot in the head. The front door of the house was open so being concerned about the wife he went to the door. From the door step he could see the wife lying in a pool of blood. At that point he got the hell out of there and called the police.
April 20, 1996. I came home from a movie and found my mother dead on the living room floor. Earlier, when I’d left, she was having a bad nosebleed.
No, but when I was six years old, I was present to see a body dragged out of a pond. A kid (actually, he was a few years older than I) never showed up back home, and there was an unfortunately confirmed suspicion that he might have fallen into the pond while fishing.
All these stories about dead bodies in apartments is really creeping me out. I always wonder, if I’m living in a place that has been previously occupied, if anyone has died there. See if I’ll be sleeping tonight.
Dr. Rieux, that’s very sad to hear. Do you mind me asking what happened to her (I hope that’s not really insensitive)?
When I was a teenager I lived in Liberia. One day I was walking along the beach with a friend and a Liberian guy came up to us and asked us if we wanted to see a dead body. Since we were 16 year old potheads we said sure. He took us up a slope a little way from the beach to a small swampy pond in the bush. There was a dead baby floating in the water on the far side of the pond. It was bloated and had bugs around it.
The Liberian guy said, “look, you can tell it was a girl child. She’s wearing a dress.”
My friend and I were just staring very quietly. It wasn’t as cool as we thought it was going to be five minutes earlier. There was a baby doll that had floated away from the body to the near side of the pond and I became very mesmerized by it. It was looking at me.
The Liberian guy said, 'It’s very sad," and walked away.
We stared some more and then walked away without saying anything. We never talked about it afterwards.
This happened more than 20 years ago and the memory of that doll looking at me is still clear in my mind even though the image of the body itself has faded. It’s an image that still evokes incredible sadness in me.
The house I lived in for about 15 years was once a funeral home (about 100 years ago). My bedroom was the room where the bodies were lain out/presented.
I’ve never technically “discovered” a dead body, but I’ve dealt with a number of dead bodies as a policeman.
I’ve experienced firsthand the meaning of “a dead weight”. Amazing how heavy the body of a petite young woman holding a red rose can be.
Sometimes life just fucking sucks.
:smack:
In my post above I completely forgot about another one.
My mother was taking care of her brother, who had bad health. She would pop in 2 or 3 times a week and clean for him etc. The last time she stopped in he was sitting up in his armchair with the TV on, but he was dead.
This was her baby brother (even though he was 60-ish) so it was especially sad for her.
The names have been changed to protect the innocent. And the guilty.
It was High School graduation time, and my friend Allen had a party. His folks were divorced, and he was a latchkey kid of sorts, and didn’t expect his mother home till after 5:00. Had the house to himself for the day, in other words. Finals were over for most of us by 10:00 am, and we were all at Allen’s by 11:00. It was a good party, but I won’t bore you with the details - let’s just say a good time was had by all. In one case, too much of a good time. In Ricky Walsh’s case, in particular. He’d wandered out to a sit under a tree at some point in the afternoon. Nobody really noticed - not that we didn’t notice either, though. Come 4:30 or so we’d started to get the house & yard cleaned up. Tried to wake up Ricky. No dice. Is he asleep? No, I don’t think so - look - there’s a fuckin’ needle hanging out of his arm! Yup, that’s right. He OD’d in Allen’s back yard. A couple of the guys there felt around for a pulse. Nothing. So, we go into the house.
“Allen, um, Ricky’s dead. He fuckin’ OD’d.”
Allen: “WHAT?!? My MOTHER is going to be home in 15 minutes! Get him the fuck OUT of here!!!”
So, a couple of guys wrapped him up in a burlap leaf sack, drove him up to the woods behind our high school, and planted him where he’d be easily and quickly found by the authorities. A vague, anonymous phone call to the police, and that’s that.
For what it’s worth, I suggested calling the police/ambulance/etc. to Allen’s house, but nobody liked the idea of inviting the authorities to a house full of drunken underagers with minds and pockets full of various chemicals.
Generally as a cop I am sent were someone else finds a body and I’m not the first one to find it. I have been one of the first at several murders and fatal car accidents but I wouldn’t say I discovered them.
Sometimes we are called on to make “welfare checks”. Some relative who is too far away to check can’t get ahold of an elderly relative so we have to check on them. I always dread these calls because you never know what you’ll find. One time I was sent to an apartment of an 82 year old man. His son had been trying to reach him for several hours. When I arrived I noticed it was the upstairs apartment so I couldn’t look inside. I knocked on the door, no answer. Strike one. I found his car in the lot. Strike two. I had the super come out and unlock the door, it was chained from the inside. Strike three, this guy is toast. The door opened out and the chain (a heavy duty replacement for the usual one) only allowed the door to open half an inch. We had to use a pry bar to get in. We went inside sniffing all the way for that usual smell. Of course we were identifing ourselves loudly the whole time. When we got to the bedroom we noticed the body. We called out to him and the old bastard jumped three feet off the bed! I don’t know how he did it but he landed on his feet screaming. He wasn’t dead but we almost gave him a heart attack. The guy was a little deaf and couldn’t hear my pounding on the door or his son’s many phone calls. The door didn’t fare so well.
By sheer coincidence, today’s Washington Post has an article on the police officers that serve on the Natural Deaths Unit. It speaks to this very topic.
I’d post a link, but access to the WP is by registration (free).
I almost saw a dead body twice my freshman year of college at the University of Iowa.
First instance: Every other morning of the week I would drag my sorry ass out of bed at 7:30 and stumble, bleary eyed and barely conscious to my 8 am calculus discussion. Half way across campus I would walk past the State of Iowa’s Old Capitol building. At about 9 or 10 one particularly dark and bleary morning someone realized the sleeping bum on the steps of the capitol wasn’t sleeping. He was a student from another Iowa college who had shot himself on the steps and fallen in a way that hid the blood.
Second instance: I was eating in a campus cafeteria when my friends and I noticed a mess of fire trucks, police cars, and ambuli pulled up to the building next door. We just assumed someone had pulled a fire alarm and ignored it and went to class. If we had exited through a different door we would have been faced with the student who had just flung himself off the roof.
I am soooo glad I had no idea what was going on in either situation.