We did, but didn’t realize it at the time.
Our dragon boat ran over a floater, but although there was a thud (quite unlike running over a log), nothing surfaced, so we carried on our way, not knowing what it was that we had hit. The next day the news reported that a body was found in that pond, and that the fellow had drowned there the previous day.
Does driving past count? (Stopping violates one of the Zombieland Rules, but I forget which one.)
The first had a flat on the FDR and his van had stopped on the shoulder of the fast lane. He evidently had the vans back doors open, was standing directly behind it, & I think he was trying to lift out the spare when the car going highway speed slammed full-on into the van from behind. Lets just say that it took me a minute to realize that there wasn’t a second guy under the car trying to fix it. 
The second one was on 440 in Jersey City. A teenager was trying to run across 440 to get to a ball field on the other side, but didn’t make it. My car was stuck in the traffic right at the covered body when they (the detectives?) yanked off the jacket to take a closer look. If I can ever offer anyone any advice in a similar situation it would be ‘don’t look’. Fight the urge, tune the radio, stare into space if you must, but don’t look. Its nothing you want to see. And you can’t ‘un-see’ it.
Sort of. There was a big fancy hotel about a block from my house and one summer my friend Brenda and I spent every day goofing around on the grounds.
One day we were doing that thing where you walk along the curb with your arms out for balance, chatting about whatever 8 year old girls chat about, when we came upon a pair of legs sticking out of some bushes and hanging over the curb out into the roadway.
We looked up and saw a group of maybe 6 cops, each with guns drawn and aimed right at us, several down on one knee in a shooting type stance and others behind the doors of their cars.
I asked the cop closest to us if the man on the ground was sick and he said “yes, yes he is and please move very carefully away from him right now.”
Brenda and I just shrugged and moved on because we didn’t really get what was happening, but geez, can you imagine how those cops felt seeing two tiny girls toodling along right after they’d shot a suspect?
I took a guy I sponsor back to his sober-living house. He called me before I got out of the driveway. His roommate was dead on the bedroom floor.
I came back and got him. I saw the kid on the floor. He had OD’d.
The apartment building on Caine Rd Hong Kong had a podium level at 4, which we’d never been to see. It is a sort of enclosed garden and view area, as supposedly there is a superstition that no-one wants to live on 4. Think 13 in a Western context.
So, we go to see the podium and in one of the adjacent u-shaped apartment buildings “I think there is a dead human being there”. Fallen to his death in the small area enclosed within the ‘U’, young man around 25, eyes open, but still.
A policeman conveniently outside, to they arrived quick, hurrying away the illegally parked business van, for the ambulance. Detective took our names and passport no.s. Never heard any more about it.
Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. I’ve found several bodies as skeletal remains, but they had been dead for about 4,000 years. The most intriguing and melancholy to me were small children buried with puppies.
Oh, wow.
Missed the bit about whether it was traumatising.
Yes, it was.
The bones were hand-sized fragments, meaning the person had been crushed like ground meat. They were greenish in parts, but the flesh had been taken from them by the sea.
They should have been anonymous to me, yet there was something personal and intimate about my finding and handling these remains, which just a few weeks before had been a living human. Male, female, child, adult, Thai, Burmese, American, Antipodean, European - I will never know. But I do know they were someone, and they were somewhere special, when they died suddenly and violently, and I was the person who found their remains and brought them to a place where, with a large dose of luck, they may have been identified by DNA and returned to their loved ones. Whoever they had been, they now had a relationship with me, like it or not.
I know now this is what I was feeling, but at the time I couldn’t articulate these feelings to myself. I had been surrounded by suffering people and places of vast tragedy for weeks without thinking it had affected me, apart from terrifying nightmares every single night. Finding the bones - and another experience not relevant to this thread - finally tipped all the subconscious feelings out of me in an incomprehensible heap. I found it overwhelming, and the experience affected me for a long time.
I saw a guy lying just off the sidewalk on some grass; something told me he was dead but I just kept driving. Someone did report it; I read about in the newspaper the following day. I know I should have done something but in that neighborhood, I wouldn’t have got out of my car unless it was on fire. Anyway, the guy was homeless and had apparently died of old age. Mostly I felt very sad that anyone had to go that way.
Two of my friends found a body that was tangled in a barbed wire fence; the guy had washed out (due to what was actually a flash flood) of a shallow grave in a not well kept cemetery----this was long ago in Texas; the guy was black and there wasn’t that big a deal made of it. He had been legally buried but not very well. As I recall, he was re-buried and that was the end of it. My two friends were pretty much horrified at their discovery; a body tangled in a barbed wire fence must have been a terrifying sight; we were around ten years old when it happened.
[QUOTH]=PoorYorick
apposite
My friend’s mom found a dead guy in a bathroom in a grocery store. That’s one of the reasons I never go to the bathroom in a grocery store.
For whatever it’s worth, I always associate your username with the courageous volunteer work you did with the victims post tsunami. You’re inexoriably linked in my mind.
I came close once. That is, I walked by an area where a few hours later the police were removing a dead body. It had been dumped there the night before (according to the newspaper) so it was right there when I ambled by.
Spring Break from college, 1993, my roommate was from Pryor, OK so we headed down there with a group of other friends. We went down to Lake Hudson, not far from his family’s home, to go look for arrowheads on the shores. After a while of no luck, I unearthed a bowl. I was all excited and gathered my friends around. We began to remove the dirt and stones around it and found a rib cage and realized that wasn’t a bowl, but part of a skull.
We had to head back to college the next day, but found out that there had been a dig a couple years prior by OSU that had found a tribe of native americans who had supposedly committed suicide by jumping off the cliff there. They somehow missed the skeleton we found.
A couple.
The worst one was a guy who got out of jail on Friday (arrested for public intoxication), bought a bottle of rotgut on the way home, then washed down a bunch of Thorazine with it. He died in an unairconditioned house in the middle of summer in Travis County, TX. His next door neighbor called it in on Monday when the stench got unbearable. My partner and I kicked the door and found him all over the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, etc.
That’s where I learned the trick of burning coffee grounds to mask the odor of decomposition. And to this day, I cannot smell fresh coffee grounds without looking around for the body.
After I created this thread I felt a bit uneasy and almost asked that it be closed.
Nine years ago a five year old member of my wifes family was abducted by a stranger, molested and murdered in Orange County California. Her body was found in a park near the ocean the next day.
I later heard the 911 call of the guy who found her and will never forget the sheer horror and panic in his voice. I felt so bad for him and can not believe that he will ever forget what he witnessed.
Back during my newspaper reporter days, I happened to be hanging out at the local cop shop when a call came in from a woman who was missing a husband. He’d told her he was going out of town and would be back on such and such a day. That day came and went, no husband.
Those of us lounging around the bullpen didn’t put much stock in her story other than to suspect maybe hubby did the old ‘going out for a pack of cigarettes’ runner until the far-more-alert-than-us dispatcher made a connection. When asked what kind of car hubby drove, the wife couldn’t give a plate number, but she pretty much described an abandoned car that had just been called in for towing from the parking lot of an out-of-business restaurant near the edge of town.
To this day, I remember that moment when she relayed the woman’s description of the car. Me, Sgt. C, and the couple of other uniforms sitting around the bull pen on a nothing-happening day all went stock-still and stared at one another.
We knew.
“Well… hell,” said Sgt. C quietly. “Let’s go, boys and girl. We got a body to find.”
When we got there, hubby’s suit coat was lying on the front seat – along with a box of 30-ought-6 shells. Some of them were missing. Sgt C and I looked at one another for a moment.
“Gonna get pretty nasty. You sure you want to tag along for this?” he asked. Like I could have said no… :rolleyes: And keep the respect of cops and firefighters across the county – as not to mention the state boys?? Not a snowball’s chance.
Back then, I knew them all and they knew me. Word would have spread like wildfire that the girl reporter wussed out on her first DB. That would have destroyed my creds with these guys and **that **was unthinkable.
Sucking it up, I basically told him, ‘it’s my story. I’m in till the bitter end.’
He nodded at my response. “Okay. Let’s go.” And we started searching.
Took a little while, because the area was pretty heavily wooded, but the coroner (aka the local undertaker) actually found the poor man first. Dispatch had called him to meet us there as we were pulling out of the police station. Small towns.
Sgt. C had a talent for understatement when he said nasty. Hubby had been dead for about a week, the coroner estimated, out in 90-plus degree heat, shotgun still in his hands. Let’s just say the CSI shows are a long way from accurate when it comes to death and leave it at that. Oh - they do get the flies right once in a while (my BIL, who actually ***is ***a CSI, hates those shows with a passion).
I kept it together, didn’t lose my lunch or faint. Like I said. I didn’t dare. And every one of the bastards was watching me as much as they were watching ‘the show,’ just to see if i’d lose it or not. 
As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one sightseeing that day. Hubby had died on a small rise under a tree overlooking the restaurant parking lot. At one point I looked down into the lot and counted no less than a dozen marked cars sitting in the lot representing at least that many agencies from the immediate area. Slow day, indeed.
I asked Sgt. C about why they were all here, and he just shook his head.
“Tourists,” he muttered with disgust about his fellow brothers in uniform. I can’t say too much. I was there, wasn’t I? My photographer showed up, took some pix appropriate for the article I’d be writing later – and then he took some for his :
: ‘private collection.’
Eew. :eek:
I don’t recall the man’s name. His death was ruled suicide by shotgun and the case closed. It was the first time I really understood - even in my early 20s - that life is terrifyingly fragile.
That was my first dead body, but not my last. Even in a small town.
Hey thanks lieu, but there was nothing courageous about what I did. I just happened to be there and have the time to help. And for the most part it was actually one of the most fulfilling and enjoyable times of my life - I got a lot out of it.
Whereas madmonk, now he is courageous. He was at Aceh (and later Iraq and Afghanistan). The thing I was involved in was a drop in the ocean compared to that.