I do maintenance at a condo/apartment complex and tonight we got a call from the fire dept. that they had to force the door to one of the units and they found a body inside. One of the association managers and myself were called out there to talk with the cops.
I don’t know any of the details yet but from what the police said I guess he was fairly young. His father is a doctor in the area and was on the way while I was there. Thank god I didn’t have to/cops wouldn’t let us go into the unit as it was a potential crime scene.
The family had called the police to say that they had not heard from the son for a long time. The fire dept. was called out to force the door open and they found his body.
I feel bad for the family. I hope whoever he was, he’s in a good place. Judging from the guitars I saw inside he’s in the big jam in the sky.
Have you ever seen a body before? Outside of a funeral home?
I was on my first police ride-along years ago. It was Mother’s Day. One of the first calls we responded to was an unattended death. Sadly, the story was this: the man’s mother was driving from her rural home to meet him so he could take her out for Mother’s Day brunch. When she arrived, she found him dead on the floor in the family room. Happy Fucking Mother’s Day to her. He had rolled off the couch, near the phone, before he had called for help I guess. There was an exercise bike there, and I saw a piece of notebook paper on the table where he had been logging his minutes/miles. His mother said his doctor had told him he needed to get more exercise. The autopsy results were heart attack.
I resolved right then and there to stay on the couch where I belong and forget about that exercise nonsense. It can kill you.
Back when I was in college I lived in a rooming house. One of my housemates didn’t show up for class or work or a date with his girlfriend. The girlfriend came over, and we found his door to be locked. I broke down the door, and found him hanging, naked. The two of us basically went into shock. I picked up the phone to call the police (this was before 9-1-1), and couldn’t remember my own address. This happened over 40 years ago, and it still gives me the creeps.
Many years ago I was on my way home from work, walking between the underground (subway) station and my home, and walked round the corner straight into the aftermath of a traffic accident. A car had gone off the road and hit a young kid, about ten years old, and knocked him across the road. He was dead and lying there on the pavement right in front of me, though someone had covered his head with a coat. He was wearing his cub scout uniform. To this day I remember him whenever I see a little kid in his cub scout uniform.
Several – I’ve covered the police beat for several newspapers over the years. The worst was covering a drowning at a local reservoir – I walked past the trailered rescue boat, not realizing the victim’s corpse was still in the boat, just as a sheriff’s deputy lifted the body up to transfer it to the coroner’s van. He lost control of the corpse, which tumbled out of the boat and onto me. It was pointed out that I shouldn’t have been where I was, and they were right. I ended up making several visits to a counselor to sort things out in my head and stop smelling lake water in my bedroom every night.
It’s been about a year now. I came into work one morning and heard the news that one of the women working on the night shift in another department had died at her desk during the night and they had found her that morning.
I really like my job, just not enough to die at it.
A guy in a neighboring department (a couple of buildings away) died at his desk and his body fell under it so he wasn’t noticed for a couple of hours.
A guy in a neighboring department (one building away) had a heart attack at his desk and died in the hospital shortly after. They said emergency services took 15 minutes to get there, but it made me wonder about the AED we installed in the building for this very scenario. That was following the death after a hike during a department outing.